Are You Considering Using A Free Email Account For Professional Purposes?

There are very few things in doing business that jump up and shout “amateur” quite as much as using a free e-mail address for your day-to-day professional dealings. Whether it be a Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com or even a (slightly more respectable) AOL.com e-mail address, it all has the same meaning to me. Cheap and lazy. Buying your own domain is a very cheap and easy thing to do, all it takes is a small commitment of $8-$10 a year and you can purchase a domain for hosting your own e-mail addresses. Doesn’t theboss@mycompany.com look and sound so much better than it5me17176@hotmail.com? I’m sure everybody would move to their own domain e-mail if they could, the problem is that there can be one major stumbling block. Receiving the e-mail from contacts who only have your old address.

Whilst many of the new free e-mail systems allow your messages to be forwarded on to a new account (Gmail is excellent) many of the older systems like to tie you in. Forwarding messages from Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL accounts in particular can be a real pain and I can understand why some people don’t like the idea of having to check 2 seperate accounts. With all the best intentions in the world there will always be a group of old contacts who will send you messages via your old address. As a small business owner you’re stuck with the decision of looking more professional but having to go through the trouble of monitoring 2 separate accounts or sticking with your old account that, well, just looks bad! The ideal solution is to find a way of having any e-mail that arrives at your old account or accounts moved on to your new account.

A viable option for forwarding from these legacy accounts is to use mail forwarding software. Most have to be paid for (as a one off fee) and the programs run on a computer you own monitoring and then forwarding any messages that arrive in your old accounts. This can cause a problem in itself because if the computer with the forwarding software on isn’t running then your e-mail isn’t being forwarded. For business purposes this could require you having to leave a computer on that you normally wouldn’t. For professional purposes the best solution is to use an e-mail forwarding service. Services like Forward America offer forwarding of Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo and AOL accounts on a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week basis. No matter where you are doing business you can be guaranteed that any e-mail arriving in your old account will find its way into your new professional looking domain account.

If you are using a free e-mail account for professional purposes then I recommend that you stop now. Make that small investment of buying your own domain name, even if you need to use a message forwarding service the benefits of looking professional are going to far outweigh any costs.

Back