Free Emails - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Email, everyone's dream and everyone's curse. If you have anything to do with any business, then you will need an email account. If you have anything to do with an internet business you will need a bucket full of email accounts. What should you use? How do you manage them? And how do you protect yourself?

First let's look at the available email providers and what's on offer.

If you have an internet service provider then they probably supplied you with an email account. If you have your own domain and web site then your hosting company will supply you with email addresses and there are free email accounts available from any number of third party suppliers.

Just to briefly explain email types. The simplest email tools are web based. Hotmail is prime example of this. Unfortunately they tend to have limitations. As they are free, they usually have limited storage space and limited functionality.

I have reviewed literally dozens of free email accounts and it is clear that you will either get very little storage or if the storage is good you will not get POP3. POP3 is a protocol that allows you to use a mail applications like Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Mail. The big advantage of using a mail application is that you can manage any number of email accounts from a single point. So in the mad world of internet business you can handle all the accounts you need.

As I said, if the free emails have no POP3 you can't do this and if you use the emails with POP3 you will have too little storage. If you want to stick with free email accounts, and you absolutely should for a lot of internet activity, then there is an alternative solution.

There are three providers that keep their heads above the others, Hotmail, Google and Yahoo but both Yahoo and Hotmail require additional payments for POP3 support and other enhancements like forwarding and auto-response.

Forwarding is where an email coming into your account is automatically forwarded to another account. Auto-response is where your email application automatically sends a return email to an incoming email.

Another big issue is that the SPAM filtering, now so important in an email package, can actually block required emails. A prime example of this is when you sign up for almost anything these days you will get a message back (an auto response) asking you to click on a link to confirm your email address. Many of the less well funded free emails have poor SPAM filters and you will start loosing important emails.

The solution is to use Google mail (Gmail). It has all the advantages you need.

1. It's Free
2. Unlimited storage
3. Good spam protection that won't block the mails you need.
4. Auto-responder built in
5. Forwarding built in
6. POP3 availability
7. Googles stunning search technology to find emails in your account.

You simply use either your existing POP3 email account as your master account or create a Google mail account and use that with your choice of POP3 mail application. This will give you off-line ability to read your mails. You can even use the web based version of Google Mail as you master account as it has unlimited storage and search facilities - but no ability to read mails off-line.

Now every time you need to sign up or give an email address online you can create a new Gmail account and set up the forwarding to your master account. This will keep any related incoming messages neatly back to one account. If you need to close that account due to an excess of unwanted mail or any other reason you simply remove the forwarding to the master account and you are clean. You can even use the Gmail accounts in your web sites for visitors to contact you. You can set up an auto-response i.e. "thanks for your request I will get back to you within 24hrs" . You then set up forwarding to your master account to manage the incoming mails.