So my hosting company forgot to renew my domain registration (despite taking my money) so I no longer own my 15 year old domain 🙁

I am not fussed about the website itself, but have lost access to all of the email addresses my family and relatives use which is annoying

Having not had to follow the trends for a while I am not sure what to do. The people I support have a mix of Apple, Samsung, and Windows machines. Some people will want access to their emails on multiple devices via a simple email client rather than a web style interface

What is the best option at the moment? Should I set everyone up with a gmail account or is there something better?

Any pointers gratefully received

TIA

Has someone else bought it?

Yup, it has a cyber squatter 🙁

Although its re-directing to a ww2 address, not sure why or what that means…

I’m hazy on this as it’s a long old while since I looked on it, but I think if you can show prior ownership you can have them evicted. Might be one for Nominet or whoever maintains your TLD.

Should I set everyone up with a gmail account or is there something better?

I do the same thing for our family and what I have is the domain name hosted with GoDaddy (other registrars are available etc) and it came with something like 100 email redirects which I use to redirect everyone’s email where they want it. Seems to work ok

The redirect thing may have been a special offer so you will need to check

And what Cougar said (of course)

What is the benefit of setting up another domain and a series of redirects?

I ‘enjoyed’ having as many email addresses as I wanted before, but the reality is I rarely used more than the 6 that I set up for the family…

Genuine question!

gmail works across lots of platforms and is simple. And it isn’t going to go away and isn’t dependent on your ISP.

I have now lost/migrated 2 domain name emails across to gmail and now have shared gmail calendars with android and IOS users, whereas sharing an IOS calendar with an android user was a bit more difficult.

I’m hazy on this as it’s a long old while since I looked on it, but I think if you can show prior ownership you can have them evicted. Might be one for Nominet or whoever maintains your TLD.

Depends on what, if anything, it’s being used for, who bought it and how. It’s a minefield 🙂

bentandbroken – I work in the industry and I can see if there’s something you can do about the domain if you want to email me.

What is the benefit of setting up another domain and a series of redirects?

in our case we were ‘early adopters’ and so have our family name as our domain name. Vanity reasons only

OK, another early adopter here and mostly held for vanity reasons, however, it made support and spam filtering easier

atlazz – YGM!

I use godaddy and a wildcard redirect to gmail, so people can email me at whatever takes their fancy – like fatbastard@domain.com.

When I register with a site I use their domain name @ my domain, so if they sell the list or get hacked then I know who the culprit is – for instance chemistdirect seem to have had a breach or are trying to bolster their bottom line at the moment 🙁