"What's your email address?"
"Just look for me on pobox.com."
"an easy-to-remember e-mail address that you can use
for the rest of your life" -- Wired Magazine, May 1995
What is pobox.com?
Sign me up.
Find someone.
Read the FAQ.
- It's a permanent, unique email alias that you can use
forever.
- Mail sent to pobox.com goes straight to your real
account.
- And when your real address changes, instead of telling
everyone you write to, just tell us. Nobody else needs
to know.
- New! An analogous system has been installed for WWW
addresses. Your pobox.com account comes free with a URL
redirection scheme: web clients will be transparently
redirected from your pobox.com URL to your real home page.
If you can receive Internet email (and you can if you're
reading this) you can use pobox.com. This
includes America Online, Compuserve, and Prodigy.
Here are just a few examples of people who'll find
pobox.com useful.
- People with long, hard-to-remember addresses. Unless
you're very lucky, you're probably in this category.
(dyoung@superdec.uni.uiuc.edu is now dyoung@pobox.com)
- Compuserve users who want a real
username, not just a string of numbers.
(71552.1674@compuserve.com is now mengwong@pobox.com)
- People who change accounts frequently -- "where does
that computer science PhD work now ... was it
pizzahut.com, burgerking.com, or mcdonalds.com?" Or,
if you're physically relocating and you're switching
service providers, your email address will change.
Before pobox.com, you would have to inform everyone you
email -- a daunting task. Now, your worries are
over.
- College seniors looking forward to graduation. If you
move to a commercial service provider, you don't want
potential employers to fall through the crack between
.edu and .com. On pobox.com, you can always be reached.
- Software authors who need to leave an email address on
their masterpieces, so users can contact them for
support, payment, etc. Such email addresses must
last for years.
- Companies and consultancies who want to pass initial
customer contact through a medium-profile front-end.
(Samuelson Consulting is represented by samuelson@pobox.com)
Pobox.com will actively help people find you. One of
the most frequently asked questions on the net is "how
do I find such-and-such's email address?" If you're
registered with us, you'll be visible in our database,
searchable through finger, WWW, gopher, whois, and
ph/qi. Your alternative is to read the
six-hundred line FAQ that tries to answer the
question. Your correspondents will be thankful that
you're on pobox.com.
Pobox.com is young. We want it to run flawlessly.
Computers are fragile beasts, and we're continually
perfecting the services we offer. Each subscriber has a
unique set of needs and desired services; suggestions from
trial subscribers have already improved pobox.com in many
ways, including requests for PGP keyservice, a commission
system, and POP service, all of which are under
consideration or development.
You get three free months on pobox.com. During those
months, you get to familiarize yourself with the way
pobox.com works, to publicize your new email address, and
decide if the convenience is worth the price.
After those three months, you pay US$15 a year.
You get up to three aliases on pobox.com. Mail to any one
of them will reach you. An alias can be up to a thousand
characters long. Though you're free to make up your
own aliases, we suggest:
- A short nickname -- try to make this as outlandish as your imagination
allows, so it won't conflict with someone else's choice.
- The username on your current account.
- Your full name, delimited by periods.
Fill out the form on this page, indicating your choice of
aliases, and where you want pobox.com mail to go. (If you
don't have forms capability, send mail to new@pobox.com.
But we'd really prefer it if you used forms.) That's all
there is to it.
An example of Web redirection: http://pobox.com/~cpage
will bring you to http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cpage/.
- Decide which aliases you want.
- Fill out the form at http://pobox.com/pobox/signup.cgi.
If you can't do that, send mail to new@pobox.com instead.
- Confirm your choices in email.
- Voila! Your aliases will be activated immediately.
An example. Suppose Wesley Crusher is a student at
Starfleet Academy, starfleet.edu. His email address there
is wcrushe4@long.hostname.starfleet.edu. He doesn't know
which ship he'll be assigned to after graduation, but he's
pretty sure it'll be on the Internet. He fills out the
form with the following information:
Nickname: trekpunk
Realname: Wesley.Pipsqueak.Crusher
Username: wcrushe4
Forward to: wcrushe4@long.hostname.starfleet.edu
We'll mail him back asking for verification. When he
affirms that he want a pobox.com account, we'll put him in
the database. Then anyone can start sending mail to Wesley
at trekpunk@pobox.com. And this will be totally free for
three months.
Try pobox.com for three months at no risk.
Fill out this form, or send mail now to new@pobox.com.
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