One main email for life
 

The short story is COX has screw my email up and can't even get it on my phone. I will go to AT&T after I move but my question is would it be better to use gmail so no matter where I go or what provider I use I will have only one main email for life?

If maintaining a single address for the rest of your life is a concern, you're far better off buying your own domain and having it hosted with a mail host provider (i.e. FastMail, EUMX, Runbox or Rollernet). Free services such as Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo are always at a risk of shutting down, and you'd lose access to the email address.

I don't expect Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo are shutting down in the near future.

I wouldn't be so sure about Yahoo these days... :)

It's not even about the companies shutting down, but they could someday decide to discontinue their e-mail services, or discontinue the "free" aspect of their e-mail services and start charging money. Or they could simply change the terms of service to something onerous that might make you wish you had hosted your e-mail elsewhere.

Having your own domain is about the only way to guarantee that your e-mail address will be completely portable, and you won't be stuck with a mail provider that you might someday regret.

True, but that's not what he asked.. He said "have only one main email for life".

I think the surest way (though nothing is certain) is to purchase your own domain and use it for email through a wide variety of services. I would venture to guess that Gmail is by far the safest of the major free services simply because it is a core functionality of their entire being as a business--with all of the others they do something else that is their major source of revenue. For example, Outlook.com would probably never go away, but I could envision a scenario where MS decides to start charging for it or make it only available to those who subscribe to some other MS service. Sure, smaller players, like FM, seem very reliable and I wouldn't hesitate to use them and count on them for the long-term, but you never know what will happen.

Another option, although via a loophole, would be to purchase your own domain and create a forwarding email address. No matter what free email provider you have, if you'd ever change you just change the "forward to:" email address to which your forwarding address under your own domain sends the messages.

That way, you don't have to move your domain away from the DNS of your registrar and not worry about whether eg Gmail, Mail.ru, Yandex, etc will continue providing free mailboxes that allow using your own domain.

Well, technically you don't need to move your DNS away from your registrar (or any other provider of your choice) — you merely need to point the MX records to your e-mail provider.

Of course, if you're using a free e-mail service like Gmail, you pretty much have to use a forwarding service anyway, since you can't just point your own domain to Google's servers and expect them to receive mail for it unless you're a G Suite user.

I've never thought of this as a loophole - it's usually a service offered by your registrar, and is quite legitimate.

POBox.com specializes in receiving your domain emails and then forwarding them to one or more destinations, though they do offer a regular webmail interface if you want it. I have several domains that POBox.com receives my email for and everything forwards to a Gmail Inbox that I use. I have Gmail set up to send as my email addresses from the various domains using the POBox.com SMTP server. Works very well and is easy to setup. Only $20 per year too.

Exactly the same setup + one Allmail on one domain (+$10).

Gmail or outlook dude. AoL is pretty decent too. The best thing about Gmail is it's ability to integrate with everything and is therefore, more useful in this age of IoT.

I doubt Outlook will start charging. They've been around since the mid-90s and had to re-brand a few years ago because they were losing customers to Gmail. People found Hotmail old-fashioned and MS wanted people to stay so they modernised their brand. Why would they start charging if they go to those lengths to keep customers?

I echo what you say about the smaller players. I prefer them to the big fish, but I still have accounts with Gmail, Outlook, Yandex, etc just in case the smaller companies close down. There's always that worry.

I've been a Pobox customer since 2001 :)
Best online deal I've ever made!