It’s hard to think of email as something you might need in an emergency. Still, it’s true: You may have to recover another online account, and you might be sent (for example) a password reset link, a one-time password, a verification code, etc. In those cases, you need your email account to be easily accessed and quickly show you incoming mail. For this reason, choosing an email address matters a great deal.
The Importance of Email Accounts
Aside from a computer or mobile device itself and the choice of browser one uses on it, an email account is far and away the most important tool for computing and Internet access that you can have. It’s a quick and easy correspondence tool and the key that can unlock any number of services or sites you use on the Internet.
It’s hard to think of email as something you might need in an emergency. Still, it’s true: You may have to recover another online account, and you might be sent (for example) a password reset link, a one-time password, a verification code, etc. In those cases, you need your email account to be easily accessed and quickly show you incoming mail.
For this reason, choosing an email address matters a great deal. Above all else, you need to have a reliable email account that you can get assistance with if something should go wrong with it.
You’ll often hear email is “the Internet’s ‘killer app,’” and there’s a reason for that. Email got the Internet off the ground in business, even before the World Wide Web existed. It’s incredibly important and central to your online life. It should be treated as such.
The Problems with Free Email Accounts
Free email accounts, such as those offered by Google (Gmail), Yahoo, Microsoft (Hotmail, Live.com, Outlook.com), AOL, Apple (iCloud, Me, Mac.com), Mail.Com, Zoho Mail, and others, can be helpful, convenient, and nice to have. All have easily accessible Web interfaces and work with most email clients, especially on mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad, etc.).
But as economists are so eager to tell us, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the same is true with free email accounts. You, the account holder, and your data are the commodities that pay for your email account. These services can read your mail (they have to; otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to send or receive the messages) and can use that information to advertise to you. Also, over the past few years, all those emails have been fed into AI networks to provide digital fodder for the likes of ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and more.
Beyond these privacy considerations, though, there’s another to keep in mind: You’ll get no real tech support beyond a support Website and, if you’re lucky, a chatbot to spit canned answers at you. If, for some reason, you can’t access your email, send a message, or something else, it’s on you to get the problem resolved. Or, to sit and wait for an outage to be resolved — assuming they’re even up-front about an outage in the first place.
Internet-Provider Email Accounts
When the Internet first became accessible from home, the providers they signed up with typically provided one or more email addresses with domains reflecting the provider’s name. This is actually how AOL got into the business of providing email. It might be hard to recall, but AOL was a dial-up Internet provider long before it became a massive Web portal. Aside from that, you sometimes see comcast.net addresses, att.net, cox.net, charter.net, verizon.net, and more.
If your ISP provides email services as part of your Internet access account, you can get tech support if something goes awry. Accounts like this are fine. We’ve recommended people use them in the past; in many cases, they can be depended upon.
Having said that … some ISPs are dropping their in-house email services. The accounts and email domains still exist, but they have been sold off to other providers like Yahoo, AOL, etc., which places users back into that big nameless hopper with all the rest of the free email account holders left to fend for themselves.
Cox is one of the more recent ISPs to discontinue providing email service to its customers. Anyone who has Cox has been notified that their email hosting is being moved. Pay attention to the information Cox sends you about this transition because you may be locked out of your cox.net mailbox without it.
For ISPs that have offloaded their email services, keeping the account is not beneficial because there is no real-time assistance, should you need it.
Why Being the “Land of Steady Habits” Is a Bad Thing
This brings me to a problem that’s very common here in Connecticut. Many people in “The Land of Steady Habits” first got access to the Internet through SNET (later, SBC and, later, AT&T). They were given email accounts by them as their ISP (whether it was using dial-up access, DSL, or near the end of their time in this state, U-verse).
Nearly all those folks have moved on to broadband from a cable company, fiber service, or even satellite, but they’ve kept their email addresses with domains like snet.net, sbcglobal.net, or att.net. People and businesses continue to use them years or even decades after they ceased doing business with SNET/SBC/AT&T.
All of those relationships — every last one of them! — were severed forever some ten years ago, when in 2014, Frontier Communications bought AT&T’s landline and ISP business in Connecticut. However, those email accounts have, for the most part, continued to work. And people keep using them, and using them, and using them, and using them.
We know all the reasons why, too. “Everyone knows that address! It’s in everything I’ve got! It’s a pain in the neck to change it! I don’t have time for it.” Folks here in Connecticut tend to be creatures of habit, more so than in other places, hence the state’s nickname.
To be clear: We very much understand this! We hear you. But seriously, those old addresses have to go. They just do.
It will be even harder to get rid of these addresses because, as of 2018, it’s no longer possible to forward them automatically to another address. Automatic forwarding is no longer available for those SNET/SBC/AT&T accounts.
The metaphorical switch could be pulled on any or all of those accounts at any moment … and it might never come back because even though the account is still being hosted, there is no longer any company technically or legally responsible for keeping it alive.
True story: We know people who lost these accounts and could never reclaim them. They are dead. Gone. Poof! Bye-bye. No more. Sayonara. The Internet equivalent of a black hole. Of course, the folks using them were unaware and had to scramble to do something about it. It’s virtually guaranteed they failed to get some important emails in the few days following their demise.
Don’t let that happen to you! Create a plan to use another address now, and then implement it. Here’s how to proceed:
- Create your new email account; see below for advice on where that should be.
- From your old SNET/SBC/AT&T address, send an email announcing your new address to all of your contacts.
- From the new address, send a supporting message announcing that this is your new email address and that you will stop using the old one.
- Be clear that everyone should use the new address from now on.
- For anyone who keeps sending mail to the old address, forward those emails to the new address, then reply from that address.
- What you want is for them only to see responses from your new email address.
- If needed, send additional instructions to people who keep using the old address and ask them to please start using the new one.
It will take persistence and diligence. It’ll be annoying. Divesting yourself from the old address might take weeks or even months. But the sooner you get it done — while that old address is still alive and working — the better off you’ll be.
So, What Should People Do About Email?
The key to having a reliable email service is to have one that you are paying for and actively supported. For those whose ISPs are still providing their in-house email, you can continue with that — but keep in mind that your ISP could divest from its email services at any time.
Another option is to use paid editions of the free services I mentioned near the beginning. If you have Gmail, consider signing up for a Google One plan. If you have an Outlook.com account, consider signing up for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family. You’ll get additional benefits with those options, such as cloud storage (or an increase to a modest “free” amount of storage) and, in the case of Microsoft 365, the use of installed Office apps, among other things. But, a side benefit is that you can obtain tech support for the services you get, which would include your email account.
Zoho offers a paid email plan, and other “cloud” providers such as GoDaddy, InMotion, Bluehost, and HostGator also offer paid plans. If you work with any of those, you’ll be fine. They all provide tech support, at least to a certain point.
Another type of email is the “secure email” service. The concept of “secure email” can be complicated, especially because it can apply internally (i.e., concerning how the mailbox data is stored, as well as how email clients access it) and externally (i.e., how email messages themselves are sent to their destinations) in different ways.
For better or worse, even the most “secure email” service can only do so much to “secure” the email messages they send to external destinations. It’s much less common than just a few years ago, but some email hosts aren’t capable of receiving all of the emails sent to them using secure SSL/TLS transmission between email servers. However, most email hosts will only accept mail sent via SSL/TLS, and the list of those is growing. Over the next few years, it’ll become impossible for any email host to send messages in any other way.
One of the better — and more economical, for reasons I’ll get to shortly — “secure email” services is Proton. It’s based in Switzerland, whose legal system offers stricter privacy protections than the European Union, which has privacy standards over what’s found in the United States or most other countries. Email messages are encrypted as they’re received and as often as possible when sent, and mailbox data (aka email data “at rest”) is encrypted. Even the sysadmins at Proton can’t read your email.
The only way to access your email data at Proton is via your account, which only you can access.
An advantage of a Proton Mail account is that it’s a “Proton” account … which includes Proton VPN and Proton Drive storage. There is also a free level of service (with no human tech support) that provides a basic level of service that many home users will find adequate, but there are higher tiers of service. These levels (including the free level) provide additional features such as VPN, file storage, and more.
For this reason, we recommend Proton Mail (Proton VPN, Proton Drive, etc.). Between Proton’s security practices, country of origin, and features offered, you’ll get more for your money — even at the “free” (as in, no cost) level. Go to https://proton.me to see what’s offered there.
An added feature of most Proton plans is that you can create your email domain. For instance, the Joneses might be able to get their mail at person@jonesfamily.com. The upshot is that you’ll have to acquire an Internet domain from the registrar of your choice and then configure its zone records (e.g., MX records) to point to Proton’s email service. Proton provides information on how to do that. It’s very clear, specific, and easy to handle. Just pay attention to the details, and you will do fine.
If you choose a custom email domain, we suggest using GoDaddy (https://www.godaddy.com/) to purchase and manage your domain. They’ll be nearly as inexpensive as the most inexpensive registrar. Still, you’ll also find that if you need to change your DNS records, they’ll be propagated to the rest of the Internet as quickly as possible.
Additional Consideration: Email Client Software
We’ve grown far beyond the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when one had to track down, download, install, and configure an email client to read one’s email. All of the free and paid email services mentioned so far provide the ability to access email via a Web browser, which can be found preinstalled on any computer (Edge on Windows PCs; Safari on Mac OS, iPhones, and iPads; Chrome on Android devices; and Chrome OS itself can open websites on Chromebooks).
Windows PCs have Windows Mail (which I’ll have more to say about shortly), Macs have Apple Mail, and mobile devices all have built-in Mail apps. You shouldn’t have too much trouble connecting any email account to whichever one is available on your device.
Still, you may want choices … and they’re available.
On computers (Windows and Mac OS), check out the following:
- “Native” applications built into Windows and Mac OS (Windows Mail, Mac Mail)
- No need to install these; they’ll already be there
- See the note below about Windows 11
- Smartphones have email clients built-in (you may hear these referred to as that device’s “stock email app”)
- Thunderbird (https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/) (this one is free and open-source)
- If in doubt, this is our recommendation; it’s tried and true, and it just plain works
- eM Client (https://www.emclient.com/) (free for personal, non-commercial use)
- Mailspring (https://www.getmailspring.com/) (“freemium”; limited version is free, or pay for added features)
- Canary (https://canarymail.io/) (“freemium”; limited version is free, or pay for added features)
- Microsoft Outlook (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/outlook/outlook-for-business) (widely used in business)
- It is not included with Windows. It must be purchased or subscribed to
- Included in all Microsoft/Office 365 plans and some editions of retail Office packages (not included in “Home & Student” Office editions
- Brutally expensive to buy on its own but can be purchased via the Microsoft Store app on Window
- We would recommend this, but it’s not worth the colossal expense for home users who don’t already have an Office subscription/license that includes it
- The mobile app stores have Outlook apps, which are absolutely free
The Apple (iPhone & iPad) App Store and Google Play Market for Android devices offer additional email clients, including some of the above (eM Client, Outlook, and Canary). Samsung’s Galaxy Market also has email clients available.
Nearly all these email clients will allow you to connect to your email accounts easily. If server and account settings are needed, consult tech support for the service that hosts your email account. (This is one of the many reasons to ensure you have real, live tech support available.)
Our advice is to experiment with these. Find the one that works best for you, then use it.
If you follow our advice and get a Proton email account, you can access it via any web browser. They now have dedicated applications (email clients) for Android, iPhone/iPad, Windows, and Mac OS. It doesn’t get easier than that. If you wish to keep using another client with your Proton account, they provide a secure connector allowing the client to access your Proton mailbox.
A final note about email clients: Windows Mail on Windows 11 (not Windows 10, as far as we know) is being replaced by Microsoft with something they call “Outlook (New).” Confusingly, this is not the Outlook email client mentioned above, which is familiar to business users. Instead, it is a locally installed edition of Microsoft’s Web-email interface or OWA (Outlook Web Access). As such, it has limited features compared with the actual Outlook. But you may like it better than the existing free Windows Mail.
Final Thoughts About Email
At the risk of being a sales pitch for Proton (and, maybe, GoDaddy) … we want you to have 1) an email service that’s 100% under your control and 2) that you can get help with if something goes awry. Gmail and AOL are great, but there’s no one at either company you can ask for help if you are in a pinch. That does not happen unless you’re a paying customer for either.
Also, even though I’ve just spent a lot of words convincing you not to use a free email service (such as Gmail), I suggest creating a free Gmail (Yahoo or Zoho Mail) account as an additional recovery option for whichever service you end up purchasing or using as your primary email address. Just as you may need your main email address to reset your Amazon account password, you might also need another one to recover your “main” email account, wherever it might be housed.
As you may or may not realize by now, the Internet is all about redundancy and confirmation. Oddly enough, you should always have at least two different email addresses you can get to and set each one up as a recovery option for the other. That’s the best Internet insurance that money can (or can’t, as the case may be).
