Email Accounts and Email Hosting
In order to use email you need first to get an email account.
There are two types of account: free (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo), and
paid accounts.
Free Accounts tend to be mainly used for personal use but there
are also many small businesses using them. I only recommend the use of free accounts for temporary use
and never for your primary email contact ( both business and
personal).
The reason is that at some point in the future you will need to
change the email address either because the free provider is no
longer free or has stopped providing the service or you just need a
more professional address.
Although it is possible to do it is not without problems see
Change Email Address FAQs
Paid accounts come in two main types:
- Dedicated Email Accounts
- Combined Website and email Hosting Package
Dedicated Email Accounts and Hosting
Until recently this capability was only available to large
businesses because of the cost now web hosting providers which
always offered email hosting as part of the package have started to
offer email hosting as a service on its own.
As an example
1and1 uk
offer email hosting for £0.70 ( 70 pence per month). Here are some
of the features:

It has the same capabilities as the email hosting that comes
combined with the basic hosting package (£1.99 per month). see
below
The idea is probably to attract customers that have been put of
because they only wanted email and not web hosting.
Using a Combined Website and Email Hosting Package
Just because the email host also offers web hosting doesn't mean
that you have to set up and maintain a website. You can use the
package just for the email capabilities.
Here is a snapshot of the email capabilities offered with the
basic 1and1 uk
web hosting.
As you can see even with the very basic package you can
have 20 email mailboxes complete with spam filtering and virus
scanning (for 5 of them).
In addition you can access them via pop3,Imap4 and Webmail.
These email capabilities are all that most small
businesses/personal email users require.
Domain Names
With either type of account you will be required to register a
domain name. Most UK providers allow you to register UK, European
and International domain names.
American providers usually only allow registration of
International Domain names.
So if you want a .uk domain name you need a UK host. If
you want a .com domain name then any provider will do.
Email Accounts, Mailboxes and Addresses
It is very important that you are aware of the distinction between an email account (or mailbox) and an email address.
An email account generally gives you access multiple email
addresses and mailboxes used to store email.
You login to your email account to manage your mailboxes and
email addresses.
You can have an email address and not an email mailbox, in which case you would use email forwarding to forward
the email to an address that had a mailbox associated with it.
Without a mailbox you cannot access or store email.
Therefore all email will need to end up in a mailbox.
Mailboxes are always linked to an email address/addresses but email addresses are not always linked to
mailboxes.
Email Addresses can, and often are linked to other addresses (Email
Forwarding).
Free Accounts
Although they are very popular I only recommend free accounts
from providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail to temporary/disposable
email addresses.
They should not be used for business email and should only be
considered for personal email on a temporary basis.
See free email accounts
for more details.
Related Articles and Resources:
Understanding Email
Addresses
Email Account/Hosting
Options -What feature should you look for in your email hosting
and what do the options mean and how are they used.
Email
Account Setup Information- What email account information do you
need before you can set up your email client and how do you get it.
Strategies for Handling Multiple Email Addresses-How
to setup, access and manage multiple email accounts, addresses and
mailboxes on a single email client.
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