I was recently helping out a local business owner who I discovered was paying to keep an email address from their previous service provider. In this case it was a Bigpond email address and because the business had been using this address for many years, it was important that it remain active. Consequently Bigpond were after a monthly fee just to provide access to this email address.  This is not uncommon amongst small business owners. When you signup with an internet service provider you will receive an email address from them for access to your account and for general email purposes. I recommend that this address is not used for general correspondence as it is locked to the service provider, so if you move to another provider (e.g. from Bigpond to iiNet) you will either lose access to this address or need to pay a fee to keep access to this email. There are plenty of free options for email that you can use regardless of the service provider you are with. My recommendation would be to look at Google (gmail.com), Yahoo! (yahoo.com) or Microsoft (hotmail.com or live.com) for a free email address that can be used from anywhere. Better yet, for business owners, I would  recommend registering your own internet domain name that can be used as an email address. e.g. I use chitteringit.com, which I have setup to use Google's gmail. A domain name is just an online address typically ending .com or .com.au. It can be used for your website address as well as email and is essentially your online identity. Note you will pay an annual fee for registering a domain name but this is not very expensive.