This week I agreed to relinquish my original domain name, editors.com. The new owner says he will use the domain to establish a site for editors and writers to commiserate. Oddly, I don’t care much how he uses the domain. When I acquired editors.com in August 1995, I had in mind to create some kind of writing site. Instead, the domain established a single e-mail identity that hadn’t changed for almost nine years.

Relinquishing a domain used primarily for e-mail is lots of work. Besides notifying a couple thousand people of the change, I have to track down every website I ever established a log-in or purchase account and change the identity or default e-mail address—many cases they’re the same.