What is there to know about email? You sign up for an Internet connection and the company gives you a free email account – seems pretty straight-forward, right? Wrong. Just because your Internet provider (ISP) offers you a free mail box doesn’t mean that’s what you want to use as your primary email account. I would go so far as to say you should never, ever use this account for any reason.
What else do I need to know about email?
These email accounts are one way a network provider can ensnare you – preventing you from switching to a better, faster, or cheaper provider when it’s available. If you switch providers (which may be your only option if you move or are seeking better service), the chances of you taking your email account with you are zero. The likelihood of you taking your past emails and your address book are slim to very difficult. Many email providers promise that they will make it a painless transition: copy over your address book and notify all your contacts of the switch. I’ve never heard of a single time this promise panned out. It’s far more likely that if you switch, all your emails and contacts will be lost forever. It’s your own responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen, and I’ll explain how.
First of all, forget about using an email address from Comcast, Verizon, Bellsouth, AOL, NetZero, or any other Internet provider. They all give free accounts, but you must resist the urge to use them. You want a free account from an independent service that doesn’t provide you with Internet access – some of the more popular ones are Google (gmail.com), Yahoo (ymail.com), and Microsoft (hotmail.com). You can go to any of these sites and create a free email account in under 5 minutes. I prefer Gmail, because it has a great interface and offers many advanced features for free that other sites charge for. Also, their spam filtering is better than anyone else’s, by far.
Now that you have a Gmail account set up, what happens if you want to switch down the road? We still have the problem of moving everything over and notifying all our contacts. Because of that, I would advise you to go one step further – set up a boutique email address on your own server, which forwards to your free account. That way, if you ever switch email providers, none of your contacts will even realize, because your email address stays the same. Your email address can be yourname@yourdomain.com for life, and the only cost is the domain registration – something like $10 per year, which you were planning on paying anyway if you have your own website.
The downside of using a boutique address is that you’ve tied your email address to your website. That can be good because it looks professional. The bad thing is that now your web server has to handle the additional load of routing your email. You may be thinking “So what, I only get a few emails per day.” That may be true, but before you know it, you could be getting hundreds or thousands of spam emails per day. Your web server could eventually spend way more time dealing with spam than serving actual web pages. To solve this, Google offers a service as part of their free Google Apps for My Domain (google.com/a). What they allow you to do is change your DNS settings on either your registrar or host (depending how you’re set up) to bulk forward all of your email to Google for processing. None of those spam emails even touch your web server. So you get the best of all possible worlds – a fast, responsive website and a personalized, boutique email address, delivered through the excellent, free Google/Gmail interface.
Because email can be so important, I would advise that you keep it backed up at all times. Google is awesome, but there are known cases where they have lost peoples’ email accounts. You want the peace of mind that in the rare case this happens to you, your email is safe and recoverable.
The easiest way to do this is to enable IMAP on your email host. This can usually be done under the Settings tab. It’s free in Gmail, but other providers charge for this feature. Once you’ve done that, you can set up your PC to read your email through it’s built-in client software (Outlook on Windows, Mail on Mac). A great side effect of IMAP: all your email stays in sync, no matter where you access it. A message you read or deleted on your home computer also shows up as read or deleted on your laptop, the web, or your phone. The final step is to set your home computer to keep a copy of all mail and attachments. This means that every time you check your email on your desktop, it keeps a copy of it on your personal machine. That way, if the server ever goes kaput, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to reclaim all those messages.
OK, I know this is a lot of information and you may not feel it all applies to you. Believe me, some day it will – don’t learn the hard way. I read on another forum: experience is a tough teacher – she gives you the test first and teaches the lesson after. Think about how important email has become in your life, then ask yourself if you’d pass the test.