...only problem is.....any sites I want to go to,
that want an email address for access or messaging won't permit ANY Yahoo address (or Hotmail for that matter).....so, I will not be bothering!

I also have a yahoo address for yahoo, buy you put me onto Fastmail many years ago, and I am still addicted to the rich featureset, despite the interface looking dated compared to the main offerings whuich are all getting facelifted.

So did you sign up for Yahoo just to secure your own name, or are you leaving the .fm service?

I'll be interested to see whether your charles.w etc
address attracts truck loads of spam. My given & surname one did, so I changed it and put in a _ & some numerals. Bingo! Hardly any spam.

I suppose it all depends on the way you look at what the online services by the GYM players can offer you. (GYM = Google, Yahoo and Microsoft)

Google offer up the Advertising market including Analytics, Adsense and Adwords.

Yahoo has Music and is working on RSS services like no other.

Microsoft is the MSN network and the all of the software.

So I gave up a long time ago on trying to keep a single e-mail address. Though I try to the best of my ability to get them all delivered to a single point and Microsoft are the only one I cannot have a 'forward' on.

So I have my own domain e-mail, a GMail, Yahoo and MSN addresses. Primary is my own domain e-mail then Gmail with the Yahoo & MSN addresses only used when I really need them.

I like how with GMail I can create an alias e-mail address of myname+internetcompany@gmail.com thus creating a style of filter for when I sign-up to an 'internetcompany' and need to provide an e-mail address. If I start receiving spam addressed to myname+internetcompany@gmail.com, I know that the ‘intrnetcompany’ has either passed my e-mail address on to a spam company or they have had a security breach. I can then just create a filter that deletes all e-mail addressed to that address. And my normal mail still gets delivered to myname@gmail.com. With the Gmail option there is no need to create the alias before you use it so you don’t have to open up your mail program to create a myname+new@gmail.com address you can just enter it as you need to.

Yahoo also have a service for disposable e-mail addresses which can be accessed from your Yahoo mail page and then select ‘Options’ and then ‘Address Guard’. From there you can create a complete alias mail service with an unlimited amount of disposable e-mail addresses. With this part of the Yahoo service you create an email name that has nothing to do with your name such as ‘kewl_hand_luke’ and you can then add another sub alias to each of those such as ‘microsoft’. You then have an e-mail address of ‘kewl_hand_luke_microsoft@yahoo.com.au’ and all of this mail gets forwarded to your yahooeID@yahoo.com.au e-mail account. As with GMail if you start getting spam to that address you simply delete the address and no more spam. The Yahoo service you first have to create the e-mail address before you use it.

I like the Yahoo e-mail way of doing things better than the Google way as I doubt it would take long for the spammers to start automatically removing the +internetcompany section of the e-mail address and sending mail directly to myname@gmail.com.

Either way the Gmail and Yahoo mail services can offer me something that no matter what I try with my own e-mail service is quite difficult to do and time consuming. I can create as many alias’s for my own domain as I want to though I really don’t want 50 different e-mail addresses on my own mail server for my own name. So using either/or of Yahoo and Gmail services I can cut down on the way spammers can get my e-mail address to spam me.

As a sidenote I still want to find who registered with the spammers the ‘dong@’ e-mail address of my domain as the amount of spam that hits that address is usually around 100 messages a week.