I was recently helping out a local business owner who I discovered was
paying to keep an email address from their previous service provider. In
this case it was a Bigpond email address and because the business had
been using this address for many years, it was important that it remain
active. Consequently Bigpond were after a monthly fee just to provide
access to this email address. This is not uncommon amongst small
business owners. When you signup with an internet service provider you
will receive an email address from them for access to your account and
for general email purposes. I recommend that this address is not used
for general correspondence as it is locked to the service provider, so
if you move to another provider (e.g. from Bigpond to iiNet) you will
either lose access to this address or need to pay a fee to keep access
to this email. There are plenty of free options for email that you can
use regardless of the service provider you are with. My recommendation
would be to look at Google (gmail.com), Yahoo! (yahoo.com) or Microsoft (hotmail.com or live.com)
for a free email address that can be used from anywhere. Better yet,
for business owners, I would recommend registering your own internet
domain name that can be used as an email address. e.g. I use chitteringit.com,
which I have setup to use Google's gmail. A domain name is just an
online address typically ending .com or .com.au. It can be used for your
website address as well as email and is essentially your online
identity. Note you will pay an annual fee for registering a domain name
but this is not very expensive. |
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