If your primary email address for your website does not end in your website name, then the chances are you are tied to one of the email addresses issued by your service provider, or perhaps you are using a gmail, hotmail or yahoo free address? Here are some things to think about…
If your email address is one issued by your broadband supplier, this means your organisation is tied to your broadband supplier, you cannot move to a lower cost provider because you will lose your email address. Then how do people contact you? You may be paying extra for additional email addresses. Those default email accounts issued by BT tend to be 1GB in size too which is not a lot of email.
What should you do?
If you have a website and it is your intention to retain the website address, and it is associated with the business or charity then you should use your domain name for your main and any subsequent email addresses. For example if you have a website called www.mycoolsite.co.uk then you can have an email address called info@mycoolsite.co.uk. If you do this and I am hosting you, you can have 10GB email boxes, as many as you need and at no additional cost. It also means you can review your broadband supplier prices and see if there is anything better around. I changed from BT to John Lewis, a better package and saved over 30% of the cost just over a year ago. I could only do that because my primary email address was not a BT one.
One for All
If you are currently using one email address for your whole office whether that is a BT one, gmail, yahoo or hotmail, please get in touch and I will get you set up with your own email account that you can administer.
GMail, Yahoo and Hotmail
Some people use free email accounts when they first start up, and never relinquish them when they are established. This can sometimes be a problem. A couple of years ago someone called me to ask if I could reset their hotmail password because the account had been taken over. To make it more complicated it was their main business/charity email account, so everything was tied to it. The problem with free email accounts is there is nobody you can talk to, to get things sorted out quickly. It took a month to get it back, so they lost comms for that period.
In my experience I have come across more hacked email accounts using gmail, yahoo, hotmail than any others. If your account is hacked, you have to go into an automatic arbitration service, which may take more than a month before you finally get back control.
Some people use gmail accounts for charitable entities. These are not your standard gmail accounts but come with some extras. Many Child Contact Centres use them. If you have to use a free email account, make sure you have two factor authentication (2FA) set up on it. This will tie password recovery and access to your mobile phone. So in this case a hacker figuring out your password could not take over the account.