There are all of these “awesome” free e-mail services out there to choose from. Some are provided by your internet service provider (Comcast, BellSouth, SBC, AOL, etc…). Others are provided—free of charge—as part of a web portal’s business plan (GMail, Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, etc.) Some are even provided by your brokerage or franchise (kw.com, remax.com, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, etc…).

The biggest problem with using these e-mail services can be summed up in a phrase: lock-in.

Internet service providers give us MANY different ways to import our old e-mail into their e-mail systems, but I have yet to find a single one who bothers to provide even a single way for us to export our e-mail archive in their system into another e-mail system!

For example: If you switch from AOL to BellSouth, I can guarantee that AOL’s support representative will certainly not entertain forwarding your AOL e-mail to a BellSouth account. Same thing applies if you’re moving from any internet service provider to any other internet service provider.

Brokerage provided e-mail accounts are just as bad. See what happens when you ask your Prudential broker if he’d be willing to forward your old Prudential mail to your new RE/MAX e-mail address. I think his answer will involve something freezing over…

Another issue is privacy. Google’s highly regarded G-Mail system reserves the right to statistically analyze the content of your incoming and outgoing e-mail and use that information to improve the targeting of their internet-wide advertising colossus.

Two steps to avoid having your e-mail address held hostage:

  1. Reserve a domain name. ($8 to $12 a year)
  2. Buy POP3 or IMAP e-mail service for your domain name from a hosting company. ($20 - $100 a year)

It’s not free, but domain name ownership is an extremely affordable way to have equity in our own e-mail address, and spares us the greater expense of having our on-line identities held hostage by sub-par internet service providers, unsatisfactory franchises, snooping corporations, and the like.