We would highly recommend you do not use free email services for business email, here is why:
Many free email providers (despite the fact they facilitate much of the world's spam with their free email accounts) are paranoid about spam. In a bid to fight it, they install aggressive, ill-considered spam filters on their mail servers. They are trying to create a “one solution fits all” program to accurately filter email. This is plain lunacy. Let me give you an example:
We are your web host so obviously, you need to see emails we send you as they may concern your website. Our billing system notices the credit card that you use to pay for your hosting has expired, so it emails you. “Your credit card has expired”. Now because there are lots of spammers who promote credit cards, the free email company is refusing emails with the words “Credit card” contained in the email subject. They simply delete our email to you. They do not ask you, they do not tell you, in short, they censor your email.
That is a very simplistic example, but you get the idea.
Let's say like most websites you have a contact form on your site. You tell the form to send all messages to me@hotmail.com (Or some other free email address) because the email has come from a form, it can be rejected by free email providers. Result? You are losing messages and enquiries from customers, you are losing business.
THEY decide for YOU what is and what isn't spam, and simply block emails that may be important to your business. Why would you want someone else to have control over your business email?
If you have a web hosting account with 3001 Web you can have up to 100 different email addresses on our smallest package, we suggest you set up a BUSINESS email address or two. This will ENSURE you get any email sent to that address, we do not censor your email.
Not only is this more reliable, it is more professional. Which of the following do you think potential clients will think is more professional?
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We have help with setting up email accounts here in the knowledge base.
You can either check your business messages using webmail on our server, or you can get an email client to use on all your devices.
If you are concerned about spam we have help on that too, but with the focus on dealing with it quickly not getting paranoid about it and blocking anything. (Also recommended, this saves us hours and gets rid of spam in a few clicks.)
If you absolutely MUST use a free email account for your website, the ONLY one we recommend is Gmail from Google. Gmail has quite effective spam filters, but they do not just delete email they think is spam. Google chooses to sort email rather than block it.
