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Why You Shouldn't Use a Free or ISP-provided Email Address for Business

If you're like most people, you use an email address given to you by your internet service provider (ISP), even if you have a company web site. It's free and convenient, and you save time and trouble not checking email from multiple accounts, right?

Wrong!

You probably already know that if you change ISP's (for instance, switch from AOL to Verizon), your email address will change. But what if you're perfectly happy with your ISP and have no plans to change? Doesn't matter! For example, how many people had email addresses @mediaone.net? Then in February, 2002 Media One became AT&T, and all of a sudden everybody's address changed to @attbi.com. People didn't get a choice; they had to notify every mailing list, business associate and friend about the address change if they wanted to continue receiving email from them. This happened AGAIN, in July of 2003, when all the @attbi.com addresses were changed to @comcast.net, and all those people had to notify everybody a second time. (Note: this information is true for Western Massachusetts; I don't know what happened in other parts of the country).

It was even worse for anyone with their email address printed on their business cards or letterhead. Not only did they have to have everything reprinted, but potential clients or old ones who had the old information saw their emails bounce back, making it look like the recipient had gone out of business.

Besides having no control over address changes, if you actually have a company URL registered, it's really bad from a marketing and branding standpoint to use a free or ISP-provided account. Instead of your email address reinforcing your company name, it's providing free advertising for AOL (or GMail, or Verizon, etc.).

So how can you avoid the whole problem? It's simple.

Step 1

Register your own URL. For anywhere from $8 to $35 a year, you can register a web address. You DO NOT have to have an actual web site to use a domain name as part of your email address (you@yourdomain.com).

Step 2

Create an email address at your hosting account. (If you don't have a web site hosted somewhere, you can still have email-only hosting.) If you have a web site, your hosting provider should have included email accounts as part of the hosting agreement. You (or your webmaster) will still have to set up the email accounts but there should be no additional charge for the accounts themselves. If you don't have site hosting, get an email-only hosting account, or the smallest hosting account you can get relative to the number of email addresses you want (plan on 5-10gb per account to handle attachments or if you plan infrequent email downloads and want to access your email mostly through a web browser; go bigger if you send or receive Photoshop, video, or other large files).

Step 3

Set up the email software on your computer to automatically download from your new account. And use your email program (Outlook Express: Rules, etc.) to automatically sort mail so that email sent to different addresses goes to different folders (very handy, for instance, in keeping personal and business email, or sales versus requests for information, separate without having to log in to multiple identities or accounts or sort through your in-box). You should also be able to check email through a web browser from anywhere - check with whoever is hosting the email account for how to do this.

If you already have a web site

and aren't using that for your email address, contact your webmaster and have them set one up for you. Then set up your email software to receive emails from the new account, and check with your webmaster or hosting company for how to check mail through your browser so you can do that when you're not at your home computer.

If you don't have a web site

Set up an account just for email hosting. Network Solutions offers email-only hosting, you can purchase a hosting account at any discount ISP and use it for just email, or you can purchase an email-only account from Jo Landers for $35/year.

By doing this, you can have the same email address for as long as you keep your domain registered (whether or not you have a web site) and your email address will be in your control no matter what happens to your ISP. If you have a web site, it shouldn't cost you anything (other than possibly a set-up fee). If you don't have a web site, it will cost roughly $45-60/year to keep the URL registered and have an email-only hosting account. It is well worth the cost, especially if you have a business, to have a permanent email address that is fully in your control and reinforces your company name.