About 6 or 7 years ago it occurred to me that having a 'free' email address really wasn't a good idea.. In my opinion your email address is just as or even more important than your telephone number. Like your phone number, most people don't change their email address very often. In fact I've probably gone through 3 or 4 phone numbers in the same timespan but my email address has never changed. Having your email tied to a 3rd party that you can't move away from is dangerous... think of it like having a phone number that you could never port away from sprint, t-mobile, or verizon. You'd be trapped to that provider, the minute you tried to leave you'd lose all of your contacts and ability to communicate.
Plus, what if the 'free' email provider somehow went under? Who 'owns' your emails when you use a free platform? what rights to privacy do you have? Did you know that many of those 'free' providers scan your messages in order to serve you advertisements?
I was one of the early adopters of gmail and had used it religiously for more than a decade. recently however I decided it was time to break up with google and take my life back. thankfully i had invested in my own domain and was able to take my email address with me. for most folks i highly recommend going out there and registering your full name or last name as a domain. registering the domain is pretty cheap, usually $10 or $12 per year and enables you to create a personal email address that you can take with you anywhere. it also enables you to have your own website should you choose to do so later.
side note: Unless you want to run your own email server you'll probably also need to shell some dough every year for hosting. again, in my opinion this is well worth it as many providers include additional services and better terms of service for paying members. it's also a lot easier, more secure, and safer to use a major provider than trying to roll your own and maintain a server.
In my case what i did was register my last name then created email addresses for all of my family members that were firstname@lastname.com. This is a nice touch for professional correspondences (like resumes) and makes is very easy to give people your address over the phone for business or personal reasons. It also means you can move your address to just about any email hosting platform with just a little effort and never have to risk losing the address. now i know what you're thinking: this sounds like a giant pain in the ass. -- well, not really. it'll require a little effort up front but once established it's pretty hands off.
All of the services out there will have their pros and cons. As mentioned above, I was running my personal email addresses on Google for many years which is very convenient and included a lot of great features like photos, drive, docs, etc. It cost about $5 per address per month which may be more than many are willing to spend but again, it was well worth it in my opinion. Recently however i've ditched google and moved over to protonmail. breaking up is hard to do but I gotta say, I LOVE protonmail so far. The product is very good for security minded folks as it as includes a lot of very nice features out of box like 2 factor authentication, encrypted email, spam filtering, and VPN (if you buy the visionary plan). Plus their servers are stored in Switzerland, a country with some of the strongest internet privacy laws.
There are a lot of tutorials and guides online that can help get you started but I'd be happy to put one together if this is something the steem community would enjoy. so what do you think folks? Are you ready to make the switch? Would you like me to put together a tutorial helping to explain how? please leave a comment below letting me know!
