Most ISPs (Internet Service Provider) provide an email address to you when you sign up for their service.  Which is nice, except for when:

1. They go out of business
2. They are purchased by another company
3. You move

Locally (Susanville, CA), the high speed cable service provider has changed hands three times in the last 4 years.  Anyone that had an adelphia.com email address had to change it to roadrunner.com.  Now they have to change it again to a windjammer.com address.  For the technically inept, this creates a challenge; not to mention the PITA it is to now inform friends, family, and companies that your email address has changed.

The solution is simple.  Get a free email address from Gmail.  Yes there are others such as Hotmail and Yahoo mail, however they lack many features that Gmail offers, such as:

1. POP3 access - which means you can still use Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird to access your email
2. IMAP access - you can use the aforementioned email clients on several computers, and they will all look the same
   
3. Email storage - Yahoo and MSN have low limits on amount of email stored (you can get more space with them but you have to pay for it); Gmail currently has over 7GB of storage space, with that number growing daily
4. (Almost) Ad free - Yahoo and MSN have flashy ads, things moving all over the place, when you're trying to check your email; Gmail is clean cut, no large ads all over the place

So if you don't already have one, get a Gmail account today.