Wait! Don't touch that free email from your ISP!

Go  see a lot of customers and other people who are not our customers who are using the free email account that they have been gifted with when they signed up for Internet service with their local Internet Service Provider. We often cringe when we see or hear of these email addresses. Don't get us wrong, they don't mean you are an inept technology user or that you will have a horrendous experience. We just know that there are so many better options out there that you could have chosen, but that's okay, you didn't know. Hopefully that's what we are here for, to be your trusted technology advisers.



Many work emails don't suffer from this issue (although some do :-( ) It's most likely going to be your personal email that suffers from this and when we see it, we can't help but cringe. Why do we cringe every time we hear of @verizon or @twcny.rr.com or @earthlink or @fillinyourownisphere? There are several reasons we tend to stray away from these. First of all, yes they are free, and that is really an enticing offer. However, all these other great email services that we will recommend in a little bit are just as free and offer even more features. An ISP provided email is more like a physical mailbox fixed to a post in your front lawn. Mail sent to that address will always go to that mailbox. When you move you have to get a new mailing address. The same concept applies to an ISP email. It's for this reason and the several others listed below, that we try to stray away from those types of email accounts.

• When you move, you lose your email and have to deal with telling all of your contacts what your new email address is. Not to mention you have to update all of your accounts you ever created with your new email. Can you name them all off the top of your head?
• It's usually an inferior service with less features and outdated webmail interfaces.
• Rarely, but in some occurrences small ISP's go out of business. With them goes your email address.
• A lot of these ISP provided email services rely on using a pop connection. This type of connection relies on one computer to pull the email off the server forever. The mail now lives on that one computer and can only be seen from there. What happens if you are out of town or if that computer dies? There goes all your email with it. 
• Spam is often a big problem with ISP provided emails. The spam filters that do exist (if they exist at all) are usually not nearly as powerful as many other larger free services.
• It just doesn't look as professional as some (not all, looking at you AOL!) of the other free email services. You want to portray your understanding of technology and ISP emails just don't give off the vibe that you are looking for.

As you are starting to see, there are many cons to using your ISP's free email. Again, we are not saying they are the worst thing in the tech world (that's another list for another blog). However, we do think you should look into changing to another service before you come to a point where you meet one of situations above. It will be much less stressful to do it on your own time rather than in a time crunch.

In our professional tech opinion, there are several other free alternatives that use cloud based platforms and are far superior in almost every way. Yahoo is a popular one with many rich features and a policy of deleting the account after so many years of inactivity which means yourname@yahoo.com might even be available! Outlook.com (formerly known as hotmail) is also a very popular option. This is run by Microsoft, the company that brings you Outlook, and has styling and functionality very similar to that which you are already accustomed to using in your work environment.

Last but not least is our favorite as nerds, Gmail! Gmail comes with chat for your other Gmail contacts and a host of other services included such as drive to store documents and pictures in the cloud (15gb free) and blogger just to name a few. Having a Gmail account also demonstrates your knowledge and understanding of the technical world we live in and is the most widely used service by nerds like us.Your Gmail account is also used to set up any android device you own or may own in the future. Gmail will also allow you to configure Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or other mail clients, if you wish to continue using them at home. Spam filtering is one of the industries best in Gmail and up-time is 99% with the large amount of servers behind the Google walls serving up your email

WAIT! What if you want an email solution for your business? Do the same ideas apply?  The answer is more of a "kind of". It's not advisable to use your ISP as your mail provider for your business. Having a business email look something like ABCcompany@yourisp.com just doesn't look professional for business. We have a great solution that we as a technical support company call Hosted Exchange! It allows you to have yourname@ABCcompany.com email addresses for all of your users. We keep the server in our own little world so you have nothing to worry about in that realm, but still get all the awesome features that come with exchange and using outlook. It's a wildly popular solution for many of our clients. Give us a ring at 277.8585 for more information!