aNewDomain.net — The first email account I ever used was RocketMail. Back in the early 1990s it was a pretty popular service with the nascent webmail culture — and, I presume, with the astrophysicists and astronauts among us, too. Now I want a Star Trek domain name for email. That’s what this story is all about.
As for RocketMail, it eventually lost the Internet-based email wars to a riot of upstarts, including the services now owned by the big boys, like Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and, of course, Gmail from Google. But I still have plenty of fond memories of the propulsive and whimsically-named email service.
So when I heard about the possibility of getting a Star Trek — a Trekker — email address, I thought it was time to engage.
In 2008 Yahoo resurrected the RocketMail brand and I was happy to see it. But the world is such a different place nowadays. RocketMail is inexorably a part of our shared Internet history. Signing up for it now would make a lot of us feel like anachronistic graybeards.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
So I thought of our old email friend recently when CBS Consumer Products announced it was launching email accounts with Star Trek domain names. Trekkers now have three options to chose from: Starfleet.com, ToBoldlyGo.com and, of course, USSEnterprise1701.com. Probably there are even more Star Trek email accounts on the launching pad.
WarpSpeed.com, perhaps? Borg.com? Section31.com? OrionSlaveGirls.com? SevenOfNine.com? Or maybe — this would be my favorite — QMail.com?
Zot!
Finally, those of us who remember it will get our reward with an appropriate replacement for our discarded RocketMail accounts. When you think about it, what’s bigger and better than a rocket? The USS Enterprise.
Unique domain names are a great way to assert your individuality.
And if you’re the type of person who is concerned about your brand and how to control it, you probably already acquired a memorable domain address for all your online correspondence a long time ago. All email services give you options–Mail.com, for example, offers over 200 domain names to choose from. And there are numerous other middlemen who will help you get started, sometimes for cheap. Of these, NetworkSolutions.com and MyBrandEmail.com are just two examples.
But what’s the fun of having a simple, declarative email address like BarackObama@USPresident.Com or MaryPoppins@Nanny.Com?
Be creative, that’s what I say.
How about DBZMail.com, for example? Thanks to Mail.com, you don’t have to be named Goku or Piccolo to be part of the Dragon Ball Z universe anymore.
And WongFaye.com is available right here and now for fans of Faye Wong. You know her — the Cantonese chanteuse. But if you need, as the King would say, “a little less conversation and a little more action,” surely an elvis.com domain address would do the trick.
There are so many choices to consider. Looking back, all it took was a little RocketMail science to inspire all this creativity and self-expression.
Engage! For aNewDomain.net, I’m Eric Searleman.
Based in San Francisco, Eric Searleman is a senior editor at aNewDomain.net. He’s worked as a newspaper reporter, a fiction editor, a comic book artist — and even a rocker. He’s edited novels for Eraserhead Press including “Trashland A Go Go”, and he’s illustrated books for Immedium including “Animals Don’t, So I Won’t”. Read Eric’s blog about superheroes at http://superheronovels.com/author/esearleman/ or check out his bio on aNewDomain.net
Love this,