Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Create a Business e-Mail Account

This is one of the shortest, easiest, and most often overlooked pieces of advice for writers - and really anyone in any professional capacity:

Do not combine your personal and business e-mail accounts. As we saw this last election, it can be dangerous to your career, but more than that, it is simply confusing. One of these days (either here or, more likely, over to The Cyberculturalist) I will show you how to setup filters to sort your incoming e-mail, but that notwithstanding, you still need a separate e-mail account for business purposes.

There are several free e-mail services you can use, but your ISP usually includes several e-mail addresses for free. I would first check with my ISP to see, and then choose from one of the many free services, including Windows Live, Gmail, even AOL. With the proliferation of spam these days, just about any account is as good as the other; free e-mail services used to be bad about spam, but all e-mail accounts are these days and many of the free services have better spam-filtering procedures than Internet Service Providers.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009

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