PoBox.com is an email redirection service: you can purchase one or more email aliases from them for many years at a time (I prepaid for 12 years) at a low price and they will forward email going to those aliases to wherever your email is supposed to go. School, job, or ISP changes no longer disrupt your online world. Everyone knows your address and it will not change. There are several sites that offer this kind of service now, but PoBox, when I started doing business with them over ten years ago, was the first.

They offer a number of additional features which still puts their service above the rest: easily changing aliases or adding new ones, customizable SPAM filtering, pager/phone support, an outgoing mail proxy, etc. They even have step by-step instructions for other site administrators to set up SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records and have spearheaded an effort to reduce SPAM and Spoofing.

Where PoBox really shines, however, is their support. I have had very few occasions to use their support over the years (which is, in and of itself, sufficient praise), but when I have had to, they are prompt, professional, and courteous. Never once has the problem been their fault, but they helped solve it anyway.

Recently, I had difficulty accessing their website and erratic problems sending mail through their SMTP proxy service. The PoBox system kept rejecting passwords even though they came directly from the Apple Keychain and had not been changed recently. Their support reset my password for me immediately and followed up when I continued to have problems, including attempting to reproduce the problems on their own Macintosh systems. Eventually it was traced to a bad binary patch in the recent Mac OS 10.4.3 update which apparently corrupted the Keychain components and caused the wrong passwords to be stored and sent. Reinstalling those programs from the combined update fixed the problem.

I did not once get the typical support response of "It is not our problem, go away." The support staff (Kate Marslin) was polite, professional and knowledgable throughout. They were clearly familiar with my OS and applications and I did not get a "Well, we don't support that, go away." Overall, the best support experience I have had in a long time. My account comes due for them sometime this next year, and I fully intend to renew for another twelve years.

Keep up the good work folks.

Ahaa thanks for the sweet reminder evought. PoBox.Com is in all probablity the oldest redirection service alive. I started using it WAY back during 1995 or so.. and it used to offer free accounts then. Of course in the following years such a plethora of email services offering a diverse variety of features (including email forwarding) came out that I completely forgot about them...

Feel great to hear that they're still alive and going strong