Tim Sneath:

Like a lot of people I know, I keep my work and personal email separate for various reasons, and I bought a ten-year lease on a vanity domain name a little while back. I don't want to be tied to a single mail provider for the rest of my life, and I want to retain some control over my email address as well as having something that's easy to remember. Of course, this has precluded me from using Hotmail, the shared personal calendar services, the new Kahuna mail beta, or a number of other new Windows Live services that we're starting to roll out, as well as the inconvenience of having to maintain my own mail server. On the other hand, I don't want to become timsneath186@hotmail.com just to benefit from those services.

I was therefore delighted to see an internal mail announcing the launch of a new Windows Live service yesterday that allows you to be a fully-fledged member of the Windows Live world whilst bringing your own domain. Windows Live Custom Domains allows you to use Hotmail (or soon, Kahuna) for email whilst retaining your domain name. You just register the domain of your choice and point the MX record to the Hotmail servers (having registered on the Windows Live site), and you can then simply sign in with your own email address to Hotmail and receive mail there. For me, it was quick and painless to move my entire family over to the new service - barely five minutes' downtime and we were receiving mail at the new location. Now my wife can get at her email from anywhere without relying on a POP3 client; we can see our email as part of the live.com portal, and we've got free email with integrated IM capabilities.