In 1995, I signed up with an e-mail forwarding service called pobox.com. They would give you e-mail aliases that would then forward to whatever real e-mail account you were using at the time. The basic plan came with three aliases, and at one point I was using six. Super convienient!

They also added the ability to use those aliases to redirect to a webpage. Back then, your web address might be something long like www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/1842 (my original home page at GeoPages) or be something with a “~” in it like http://www.mcs.net/~werner/yester.html (the original location of www.yesterland.com before it had a domain). Pobox allows aliasing those so users only had to know www.pobox.com/~disneyparks and it would redirect to whatever service I was using to host my theme park photos at the time. Super convenient!

Over the years, my e-mail has moved from service to service to service, yet I never had to change any e-mail addresses with any services, or notify any of my contacts about a new address. They just used the same e-mail address I had since 1995. Super convenient!

But in 2015, Fastmail acquired Pobox.com:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail

The way they handle spam filtering is much worse (no e-mail summary, no one-click way to look at items in a web page and release/white list them, etc.). E-mails from my Softaculus (WordPress) service ALWAYS get spam filtered and they have been unable to fix this. E-mails I send to folks bounce back at the Fastmail level due to reasons I haven’t figured out. It’s a mess.

So, while I told everyone about how great POBOX.COM was for 30 years… I cannot recommend FASTMAIL.COM

But they own the e-mail I have had since 1995 so I guess I am sticking with them. At least for now…