Do you actually own your e-mail address?

If you currently use Gmail, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, or any other hosted e-mail solution, then the answer is… NO! You do NOT own your e-mail address. Which means it can be taken from you at any time, effectively locking you out of all your other online accounts.

This website will teach you how to take back permanent ownership of your e-mail address – your most important online account – so that you never get locked out of the Internet.

Can you imagine if your Google Account got suspended or permanently banned?

That means losing Gmail access, plus all your e-mail archives, contact list, Keep notes, Voice number, Drive storage, YouTube subscribers / playlist, etc.

But wait, it gets worse…

Your Gmail is probably your recovery e-mail for all your other accounts. So losing access to your Gmail effectively locks you out of every other online account you have.

(For example, try changing the e-mail address associated with your bank without being able to login to your current e-mail to confirm the change. It's difficult for a reason.)

If you think that having your Google / Gmail account suspended or banned can't happen to you — well you're crazy.

Look it up. It happens. In fact, it happens enough that there are $5,000+ services that advertise that they will help you regain access to your account.

I had an e-mail address for each one of my businesses, but most of my personal online accounts were still tied to my Gmail address.

However once I learned about the risks of having my entire online identity connected to my Gmail address for recovery, I made it my goal to completely remove my Gmail address from the equation by creating a new permanent personal e-mail address associated with a domain that I own.

And I highly recommend that you do the same, which I'm going to teach you how to do in this tutorial.

I still use Gmail to send/receive e-mails because I like the web user interface and mobile apps, but now I use Gmail to send/receive mail from my new on-domain e-mail addresses. Kind of like how you may use Outlook for your business address.

The transition of changing from my @gmai.com e-mail address to my new personal e-mail address involved reassociating all of my personal online accounts (banking, social media, etc) to my new private domain e-mail address, and then never giving out my Gmail address again — except as a backup e-mail for my domain registrar in the event of an issue with my domain name.

The purpose of doing this is so that if I were to ever lose access to my Google account, it would suck, but I wouldn't lose access to the rest of my online accounts. I could just login to my e-mail accounts a different way and figure it out from there.

Note that this isn't a slight against Google — that's just who I use. It's a risk having all your eggs in ANY 3rd party e-mail basket whether Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. E-mail is no longer optional in our world and we can't give complete control of all our online accounts to one service, whoever they are.

It's not expensive either. We're talking about $10-12/year for a domain and $1/month for e-mail hosting. For me, that's worth the piece of mind of never being locked out of the rest of my online accounts.

Check back on this site in a few days and you'll see my complete tutorial on how to take back ownership of your e-mail.