Here it is 2014 and I am still seeing people using email provided to them from their ISP (Cox. Comcast, etc.). Even worse, I still see couples sharing an email address! Holy Moly – let’s get this fixed, people! I won’t name names, but my two sisters are currently guilty of this. Hopefully, this article will give enough reasons to motivate people to get an email 
address that is 21st century!
Let’s define what I mean by real email vs. ISP email. ISP email is something you get included (usually), when purchasing an internet package from your TV/phone provider. For example, we live in Cox country and when we established our service, we got 7 email addresses (that we could set up ourselves). So we have an email address like blank@cox.net.
Real email is is an email address that is portable, it will stay with you wherever you move to and is not dependent upon an internet, phone or TV service/subscription.
Reasons to Have Real Email & Examples of Real Email
- The absolute best is to purchase/lease a domain and use it for your email. For example, I have 2 domains and use personalized email on both of them. One is business and one is personal. I was lucky to get my name as a domain. I think it’s cool to try to get your name as a domain, but if you can’t, there are many really cool extensions available, like the .me, for example.
- Next best is to use one of the free email service providers. I recommend Outlook.com from Microsoft. I really like the easy way to categorize different types of mail and easily configure settings to sweep, or regulate how many of this or that newsletter I want to keep. I also like that they don’t read my email in order to serve me ads. After Outlook.com, there is Thunderbird Email from Mozilla, Gmail from Google and Yahoo Mail from Yahoo. I have accounts with all of these except Thunderbird and I have multiple Outlook accounts. Yahoo is even lower than Gmail because of the annoying flashing ads, the inability to add my Yahoo mail into my desktop Outlook (unless I pay), and because they have been hacked several times. Google has made Gmail easy to set up on mobile devices, but I don’t care for the web interface and I find it difficult to navigate. But then I live in the Microsoft ecosystem.
- Portability is an advantage with your own email. I mentioned this above. If you move out of your ISP provider’s area, you will not be able to take your email address with you.
- Better for using email on multiple devices. Most free email is IMAP. This means you can have your email account on multiple devices and they will all sync up. Since I’m a gadget girl with multiple devices, this is important to me. Our Cox email used to be only POP mail, so I only could read it from one machine, because it did not sync across devices. Now Cox does offer IMAP.
- Easy set up with real email. If you have a smart phone, you’ve probably noticed in the email settings that they have Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo mail icons. This makes it easy for us to enter in our email address and password and usually that will take care of the setup. With ISP email, you probably will need your incoming and outgoing server info as well as other settings.
When I stayed with my little sister last month, she said her husband was tired of all the store newsletters cluttering up their shared inbox (yes, they are one of those people). So I set up an Outlook.com email address for her (on her iPad-haha Apple!) I also set up her OneDrive and had to be rather creative to transfer all the phone pictures from her Android phone over to her iPad (that might be another article). So now she is gradually moving her shopping emails over to this new address and both will be happier.
Hopefully these reasons for having a real email account make sense. If you need any help, leave me a comment.