has this been mulled over as a potential revenue-earner for GC? I expect it has... what was the verdict?

Another problem you get is that for about $40/year people can own their own domain name and have email like [email protected] The cost of entry for having a private domain is too low in comparison to having a permanent email address. You also get competition from societies you belong to. Both the ACM and Harvard provide me lifetime email forwarding. It's useless to me, but it's the kind of thing which competes against paid permanent addreass services.

OTOH... if there is interest, I would be happy to talk with Snaggy (offline) about how to make happen.

While I have your attention. I'ld like to do a little sociological survey about email in general. Why is the dot mac address important to anyone? What is wrong with free mail from yahoo? I ask this because I'm a privacy freak. I own several domains and yet the only email address I ever post on the net is a completely anonymous one. I maybe read it once a month. Everytime I have to provide an email address to correspond with a business I make up a new one. If I get junk mail on it I deactivate it. I don't want people to know my unlisted personal email address.

So, I wonder why people want an address like [email protected]? Is it that you want a permanent address that will work forever, or that you want to feel part of a collective? The former is only worthwhile if you only give it out to select people, because you don't want it to become a spam collecter. The latter is only useful if you think it's cool. I hate to disillusion anyone, but it's probably not. The scale I use is

100 points. Having your name as your email address, with only punctuation but no other characters

50 points. Having firstname@lastname.{net,com,org} as your email address.

20 points. Having [email protected] (or aol or hotmail or .mac)

20 points. Having lastname@ same as above

1 point. Having lastname_firstname@ any of the above

0 points anything else

<0 points. Having a number in your email address because someone else got it first.

Since geekculture is not a dominant player, there is little cachet (outside our little group) in having an email address there. So I wonder why anyone would want a geekculture address. I'm genuinely curious. People seem all bent out of shape by the .mac thing but I just don't get why.

Also, I think it would raise the profile of GC - if folks are posting to other BBs / forums / weblogs / whatever with their GC alias - word will get around - a kind of friendly form of viral marketing.

Also, there's the feel-good factor of supporting something worthwhile.

Of course, if your last name happens to be something like "Bennet", then the barrier for entry is considerably lower.

[Edit: Oh. My. God. UBB is really that idiotic??]