To be honest, my main reason for having a web site is to have my own email addresses. When I first connected to the internet, I was communicating over an acoustic modem to Cybergate. There was no world wide web at the time, just email and use-groups (sort of like today’s mailing lists or wiki’s). My first email address was at ‘gate.net’. They were bought by Earthlink, so my email address changed to ‘earthlink.net’. I then moved up from 1200 baud to 3 Mb/s on DSL. By this time we had limited access to the world wide web.

Bell South (AT&T) came through the neighborhood and said that they had put in high speed internet access to the neighborhood. When I switched to them, they said that I would have to disconnect my DSL access before they could install their access. When I did that, they said that they would be out to install my service in a month. Can you say “internet withdrawal symptom”? So I switched to AT&T DSL. I was getting better speeds on that link than from Earthlink fpr a while. My email addresses were now ‘att.net’ going through Yahoo. Corrosion on the copper wire phone lines would build up to where I needed someone to come out and scrape the connections at the local box.

Eventually the line got so bad that my connection dropped 59 times in one day. When I called for service, they monitored the line for a couple of hours and said that they found no problem. That’s when I called Comcast and switched to cable access. Now my email addresses were going to be at ‘comcast.net’.

I signed up with GoDaddy for this website and my emails are all at ‘bobsown.net’. GoDaddy forced me into Office365 (very expensive) to increase the size of my email boxes. Some of the pdf’s that were sent to me bounced because they wouldn’t fit into my small boxes. I have been using Thunderbird since it was part of Netscape. Emails were downloaded and deleted from the host whenever I opened Thunderbird.

I recently moved this site and the one for the Sunshine Chapter of the Studebakers Drivers’s Club to DreamHost. Now I have unlimited emails (still at ‘bobsown.net’) and email forwarding addresses for the Sunshine Chapter.