How many E-mail address's do I need?
Do I need more than one E-mail address?
Unless you plan to own and operate a home business that is web based products and services, No.
Dialog to friends and family only need one address. You domicile is only one address right? Unless you are super rich, you only have one address. If you live on the go, and are not home much, you can still access your mail from remote places like Internet Café’s or public libraries. If you have a laptop, and a wireless modem on it, you have this ability as well to access your mail from your ISP account.
If you plan to conduct business with online transactions, you definitely want multiple addresses. If you plan to do web marketing, you HAVE to have multiple addresses. Let me explain.
Web based services are volatile, meaning they can go offline for any number of reasons and for several reasons. Last year there were major fires in Canada. Those fires severed phone lines across vast reaches of the country. This created blackout areas, sections of real estate that no longer had phone access. While this rendered the residents without a way to connect to the Internet for a long time, it also reduced the effectiveness of the Internet.
The Internet is nothing but millions of pc’s connected to each other thru phone lines. The hardware and applications that make the web run are self aware of all these connections. When a mail is sent from point a to point b, the software doing it actually looks for the shortest path through all these lines to find the fastest way to the destination of the data it is sending.
An event of catastrophic nature like this, caused outages and in some cases, it increased the time it took to reroute data around the outage area. The recent Tsunami in Asia is another example of this. There were services and web based sites located in the afflicted countries that vanished simply because of that tragic event.
Having multiple email addresses at different major providers is your safest way to go, when you will be web marketing for that one reason. Smaller foreign email services that offer free mailboxes may save you money, but the risk of them being here today and gone tomorrow are more likely. If they don’t generate enough membership or advertising revenue to stay in business, they could abruptly close leaving you without your mail function.
There are hundreds of HYIP type websites based in Malaysia and Indonesia. Some of these got wiped out, or their owners perished, leaving members who had money invested in them at a total loss. Since the web is a global network, now reaching every point of the planet with phone access, it is possible for an extreme event of nature to disable or remove entirely a service located there.
So from a marketers perspective, go with the major networks for
web-based email.