Before getting the ideea I should say from the start that you need to remember this: always backup any important documents, emails, addresses and everything else on a second, password-protected ( better encrypted ) place. It could be a pen-stick, hard drive it doesn`t matter as long as they are in a safe place. Email is far away from being perfect and nobody can guarantee that you won`t loose your data.
That being said, let`s talk about paid email and free email.
First of all, from paid email we can think at the email adress that you received from your ISP. We can reffer to a domain name + a webhosting package or simply to a paid email address from a professional email provider such as :
fastmail
mailsnare.net (Discontinued service)
runbox
etc.
At a paid email address you shouldn`t see any ads, that`s something that SHOULDN`T EXIST since you`re paying some money for a clean, fast loading, professional email service.
On a paid email you should have your important stuff such as clients, something small that can be saved, bills, invoices and a lot of other things. Why it`s better to keep those things here and not on a free email ? Simple: you pay for this service and if something bad happens, someone should be able to help you. There are a lot of examples, you forgot your password, someone has hacked your email account or stolen your password but you should be able to recover access to your email in all of these scenarios. Why ? Because you are paying for this service and they should be able to help you. That`s not the purpose of this article but there is a connection between this article and the best paid email service here.
The advantage of using a paid email when something bad happens:
Your computer is infected with a virus and that virus will use your email address to send SPAM.
Your email provider will suspend your email address, waiting them for you to contact them.
You will contact them and you will explain what happened and they will restore your account.
Let`s move on with the free email providers. The biggest ( first three ) free email providers are those :
gmail.com
yahoo.com
hotmail.com (including outlook and msn)
etc.
At a free email address you will see a lot of ads, it will load but not that fast when compared with a paid service. When you will buy something from the Internet, in some cases you may notice that some websites does not accept a free email address or that they require an additional form of verification. This is not a problem but if you would loose access to your account due to phishing, malware or any other scenario where you will loose your account in most cases you won`t be able to recover your email address.
The disadvantage of using a free email when something bad happens:
Your email password is stolen with a phishing method or malware. Spam will be sent from your email
Your email provider will suspend your email address without any other questions because this is a violation of their Terms of Agreement.
Try to contact them if you can, chances for you to get your account back are close to zero.
Conclusion: As you can see there are a lot of advantages for you to use a paid email instead of a free one. I mean who would want to loose all their contacts with friends, business partners and in the end, why not a part of their life...If you`re going to ask me, there is only one advantage at a free email address and this is the only one: you can always create another free email address and another one and so on...but who is doing this ? An email should help us to build some connections and not viceversa. Look what, my advice is to go for the paid email, if you cannot afford a paid email ( been there, done that ) you could choose a free email provider, it will work but make sure to backup ( save ) the important stuff such as email of friends, important documents and anything else that might be important for you.
