Image courtesy: B Tal

We all have email addresses. We use them for various purposes. Some use them for bad. But many of us use email addresses for good purposes to carry out our day to day life. There are some factors you must consider when you use your email addresses (free or paid email services). You might have given your email address to various websites, forums, blogs, etc. By doing this you expose your email address to the public. Anyone can use it for any purpose then. In this post I wish to explain you about the consequences that can happen if you do so without having a thought too much.

First thing is the using your email address for scams by cyber pirates (I prefer to call them like that :-)). I have experienced this and I have put posts regarding these scams before using one of my real experiences. These cyber pirates are searching the internet for email addresses every day. They find those email addresses mainly from freely available sources like forums and blogs. If you have added your email address in those, you might have received these scam emails already and you also might have get caught and lost money. I recommend you to read my posts on the category “Scams” to get a good understanding about these scam emails. In a nutshell, you’ll receive these types of emails asking your help to transfer a large amount of money and indicating that you will be paid a portion of that money.

Next thing is get caught into trouble by making unseen friends or lovers. After some email exchanges, many people fall in love or in a friendship even without seeing or knowing the person at the other end. These good and honest feelings of yours are can be used by various underworld people like drug dealers. If you trust them without finding out more details, the chance of getting into trouble is higher. You might contact a person that you know. But there is a chance of the real person contacting you might be another one. Therefore you must find about the person who is writing emails to you. The best way is having a chat with a web cam. Then at least you can see that person. Unless you are fully satisfied with that person’s behavior, never take actions even that person talk to you with friendly and enchanting words.

The last thing is receiving various unwanted emails as spam. This will become a headache if you receive them hundreds per day. And sometimes you will buy various products which are not needed by reading those emails. This will definitely waste your hardly earned money.

If you think twice before giving your email address in public, you will be able to keep away from those troubles. I hope that you will think more about before publishing your email address in public.

Most of us use free email services to create email accounts and maintain them. Sometimes we use these email accounts to send very important emails. I also have experienced this. But there are times we hate these email services due to many reasons. I will describe some disadvantages of these free email services in this post.

The most important disadvantage is the security and privacy. We cannot control our privacy and security of our emails and profile data. All the free email service providers including Gmail, Yahoo and hotmail say that they guarantee the full privacy. But can we make sure that they actually do that. Most of us receive unwanted emails (spam) even if we don’t provide our email addresses to a third party. Some of you may know that many free email services sell their email addresses to various marketing companies. Therefore we can’t believe on the guarantees of these free email service providers.

Another disadvantage is most of these free email services provides simple web based email facilities where we can’t do many modifications. For an example if we use Gmail web interface to send an email, it is very hard to add a picture from our local machine instead of sending as an attachment. It also limits the customization of text and images. It is hard to add a customized email signature also.

Many companies provide free email services to make it as a good advertising and marketing medium. Actually that’s all they want and don’t care about how it affects the email user. For an example when you log into your Gmail or Yahoo email account, you will see advertisements in the right side and top. This is not a big headache in Gmail, but in Yahoo it is a real headache especially with their new webmail interface. I’m not comfortable with it and actually it is a headache for me. I think that most of you feel in the same way. It is possible to assume that we will lose our actual email workspace size in the coming future where more and more advertising and marketing methods are added to our web email interface. Up to now, there is one way that we can stop this by configuring an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird for our email account.

As far as I know, some companies and individuals pay less attention to the emails they receive from free email services addresses as they experience that most of them are spam. Due to this, there is a great possibility that they will miss very important emails sent to them. This will also affect us if we send important emails from free email services.

Therefore it is better if you can have a personal email account in your own domain (Ex. yourname@yourdomain.com) if it is affordable. If not, make sure that you use an email client and put an attractive mail subject where the receiver will put more attention to your email.