Earthlink allows 8 addresses, and each of them may have a free web page (up to 10 meg in size) associated with it, so there is a good reason to have those addresses, if you want to use the free web space, even if you don't use the addresses.

I have three I use there, with a sprynet domain because I started with sprynet (a poor stepchild owned by Prodigy) and it has gone through many companies to reach Earthlink.

I use a free Yahoo account because it stays put no matter who my ISP is. I think that Earthlink would allow me to continue to use my email addresses as web mail only if I left there, but I couldn't download the mail into my computer's resident email programs (Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, Pegasus). I also have a Google g-mail account that they will let me download (I don't use it much and I set it up in Outlook because I never used that for anything else and I was looking for a spare email program to test the Gmail with).

If you want to have time to notify the folks you currently email to at the accounts you're wishing to change, then I would suggest getting a new free account (like Yahoo or Gmail) and start forwarding from your current email addresses to the new email accounts. This is a web feature of email programs, free or not. Forward it to the new addresses for a while, capture those email addresses and add any others you think you need that didn't write to you for a while, and then discontinue your old account. If you haven't downloaded all of your current mail into your computer you should, so you have it for reference, just in case their web access to that mail does go away when you close the account. Even if you aren't using those email addresses any more you could still go into Eudora or Pegasus or Thunderbird and read any old mail from that account.

I hope that helps. Send a PM if you have questions.

SRS