Customize my own email address

Hi everyone. I have been puzzled by something for a couple of years.

The normal e-mail address format will usually be "username"@"emailprovider".com

According to what I know, there are only a few e-mail service providers such as yahoo, gmail, windows live, etc. So e-mail addresses should be in the following format:

"username"@yahoo.com
"username"@gmail.com
"username"@hotmail.com

However, I have seen other kinds of valid email addresses that resemble these:

"username"@gmx.com
"username"@rocketmail.com
"username"@bridexharwal.com

The thing that I am puzzled about is, according to my knowledge, there are no such email services called gmx, rocketmail, bridexharwal, etc. How could people actually register and use these type of e-mail addresses? Finally, please enlighten me on how to create one of my own. Thanks a lot!

For those secondary email addresses, they are owned by larger email providers (except for GMX). Those are secondary access email addresses to either give the customer a different feel rather than the norm, or give the ability to work on a faster server.

RocketMail.com is a Yahoo owned domain.

GMX.com is an independent email service, like Vfemail.net. It is wholly owned by United Internet, a German internet services company.

bridexharwal.com is a mail service by the Bridex company of Singapore. It is the offline domain mail server for their company (I think).

I use a couple of secondary providers for my backup accounts, or the ones I use for contests and surveys.

Thanks for enlightening me! How could I create one of my own?

Go to the Yahoo! Mail page and signup for an email address. It will allow you to select from the following:

*@ymail.com
*@rocketmail.com
*@yahoo.com

You could also get your own website which would give you an email address (quite a few with the service I use) which would look like "yourusername@yourwebsite.com"