What You Need to Know When Choosing an Email Service

There are many mistakes people make when choosing what email provider to use. It’s very easy to get something good, so there’s no reason to suffer through the lower-quality options. Here are some tips on choosing what’s best for your email.

Individual Email Accounts

Many people use a “family” email account, or share an email account between two people. Please, please get separate email accounts. This makes life easier for everyone. If people want to talk to both of you, then they can address the email to both your addresses.

Having combined accounts leads to confusion. Someone who networks with a Susan may be surprised to get an email from John Smith. Not only can this be confusing (“John, John… who the heck is John?”), but it could even lead to misidentifying the email as something unwanted, causing the email to be deleted or reported as spam. At the very least, it looks unprofessional.

It’s confusing on your end, too. Many of us deal with dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day. Now imagine doubling that, where half the email isn’t even relevant to you. For every email you get, you now need to think “is this for me or the other person sharing my email address? Do they need to read it, or can I archive it? Should I reply to it or should they reply to it?”

Not only that, but many online services use an email address to identify accounts–instead of logging in with a username and password, you login with your email address and password. That means that if you share an email account, you cannot have individual accounts with those other services, which is simply a nuisance.

It’s not as if email accounts are so scarce there aren’t enough to go around. Please use separate accounts.

ISP Email Accounts

Far too many people stick with the email account their Internet Service Provider gives them–after all, that’s one of the features you’re paying for, right?

However, ISP accounts tends to have few features, less-than-stellar spam handling, and a low storage limit. Rule of thumb: if you’re getting less than several gigabytes (GB) of storage space for your emails, it’s not enough. In this day and age, you should never have to delete emails simply to avoid having your email fill up and start bouncing incoming emails.

Not only that, but what happens when you want to change ISPs? This happens for many reasons. Maybe you move. Maybe you decide you’ve had it and can’t stand their customer service any longer. Maybe you want to take advantage of the discounts ISPs give you for switching, so you change back and forth every six months. You do not want your online identity and communication with hundreds of people and dozens of online services to hinge on your Internet Service Provider.

Work Email Accounts

Although it’s convenient to be able to check and handle your personal emails during the day while you are work, there are many reasons why it’s a very, very bad idea to use your work email as your personal email.

• Storage limits: most companies, in order to cut costs, provide employees with only a small amount of storage space. Just your work emails fill that up quickly. Why make the problem worse with emails that have nothing to do with work?
• Auto-deletion: for both costs and legal reasons, most companies automatically delete older emails on a regular basis. Why have all of your information for what you do outside of work destroyed when you can have all of your personal emails at your fingertips for as long as you want?
• Monitoring: this is truth, not paranoia. Most companies will monitor your emails, even if it’s just a program that looks for naughty words. Is it worth getting fired because of someone else’s off-color joke?
• Culpability: everything you put in writing, even at work, could potentially be used against you. This is especially true for small business owners. If a suit was brought against you, would you be comfortable with the prosecuting attorneys digging through all the personal emails in your work inbox? There’s no reason to live that nightmare. Keep them separate.
• Changes: in this day and age, the average US worker has only been with their employer 4.4 years. Jobs change frequently, whether it’s your choice or not. When you change jobs, you lose your email address and have to update everyone all over again… and besides, do you really want to have people (including headhunters) emailing you at work?

Old Email Services

This is a matter of fierce contention. Some say the email provider you use doesn’t matter; some say that it makes a big difference in your professional image. But the fact remains, right or wrong, there are some people who have a poor opinion of anyone with an AOL email address. Your email address is yourname@aol.com? yourname@netscape.net? yourname@hotmail.com? It’s entirely possible some people–such as those who might otherwise choose to hire you or do business with you–would say “this person is living in the past and has no idea how to use modern technology.”

Again, some people may feel this is wrong, or that there are few people that feel that way… but they are out there. Is it really worth holding on to that old email address and risk tarnishing your image?

Free Email Services

The big players, of course, are Yahoo, MSN and Google’s Gmail. Whatever service you use, ask yourself these basic questions about the free email service.

• are they likely to disappear? (Many of the free email accounts I had in the 90s vanished, often with little notice.)
• do they provide sufficient storage? (At least several GB. You should never have to delete an email again, unless you’re in the habit of emailing hour-long videos and massive computer programs.)
• are they recognizable, do they have a good reputation? (Again, no AOL)

I’ll make no bones about the fact that I feel Gmail is head and shoulders above the rest. If you choose to use MSN or Yahoo, you’ll also be ok, but there are some of the reasons I prefer Gmail to other email services:

• When logged in, you go straight to your inbox. This sounds like a small thing, but on the Internet every second counts–having to click an extra 1, 2 or even 3 times just to see what new messages you have is very frustrating.
• You see a preview of the first line of the email beside the subject line. Sometimes you don’t even need to open the email.
• Emails are grouped into conversations. If I email someone a question and two weeks later they reply “yes” without including the body of my original email, I don’t have to hunt for the last message–all our messages for that conversation are displayed on the page.
• Gmail makes use of Google’s sophisticated search to search through emails.
• Gmail is one of the few that allows you to automatically forward messages to other email addresses.
• With Gmail, you get Google Docs–an absolutely invaluable tool for managing documents, presentations, spreadsheets and more online.
• Gmail is the most highly respected free email service there is.
• I can “label” emails instead of putting them into folders–which means a message can have multiple labels, as opposed to one folder, making it much easier to find.
• Android phones work great with Google Accounts, even synchronizing contacts automatically between Gmail and the Android’s phone book.
• Excellent spam protection
• New “suggested contacts” feature; when you email someone, it will prompt you to include the addresses of other people you often CC in emails with that person.

This is just a partial list, of course.

Website Email Addresses

If you have your own website, you should have your own email address. It’s part of the package; if your web designer created yourcompany.com but you still have yourcompany@yahoo.com on your business cards, it’s time to fix that.

If you don’t have your own website for your business, you need one. Many people will evaluate a small business’ level of professionalism based on if they have a website and their own email address–using a free email service for your business email because you don’t have a business website makes it appear that you aren’t serious and could disappear overnight.

Even if you’re an individual, you may choose to have your own domain name– “firstname@lastname.name,” for example. The advantages are that you can have even more control over what your email address looks like. You can also change your email service provider behind the scenes over the years, while still retaining the same address. It’s essentially the vanity plate of email addresses: not really necessary, but it can be an extra touch for some people.

If you are interested in going that route, the best way in my opinion would be to get a domain name through Google. When you sign up for Google Apps, you can simply click the “I want to buy a domain name,” and then purchase the domain name through GoDaddy or Enom by way of Google. When you do this, Google Apps (including Gmail) is automatically configured for your domain. You then have your email address, an can set up a simple website.

Questions about designing a website or getting an email address at your own domain? Contact us!