Free Email Services vs. Professional Email Services

Are free email services worth the price? According to CMIT Solutions, free, web-based email services like Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail are increasing the gap of security. Spammers use fake return email addresses all the time, but if the return address belongs to an acquaintance of yours, chances are that person’s actual account (and address book) has been hacked into. We will discuss the differences between free email services vs. professional email services.

Free Email Services vs. Professional Email Services

Should I Use Free Email Services for My Business?

Security gaps happen for multiple reasons: an increase in popularity of free services and email sites, the use of weak passwords or similar passwords across multiple accounts, the failure to change out passwords at least 2 times a year, and the failure to customize your account’s security settings out of the default.

Because of these common mistakes and vulnerabilities, business owners should never use free email services for their commercial operations. The risk of a breach (not to mention the potential consequences of clients and partners receiving spam from your account) is just too high.

Are Free Email Services Professional for a Business?

Using free services also portrays a lack of professionalism to both current and potential clients. You want an email address that uses the name of your business in the domain field (i.e., the characters that appear after the “@” symbol and before the “.com” suffix). For example, our company named Centennial Arts has a domain email address (john.doe@centennialarts.com).

Register Your Company Domain with Centennial Arts

It is very important to register a domain name for your business and have your company’s email hosted. While doing this is relatively inexpensive, we highly recommend it because it’s well worth it in terms of both security and peace of mind.

These are the main differences between free email services vs. professional email services. Centennial Arts can help you build up a secure email system and/or website. We provide truly customizable website design, consulting and hosting, email enterprise solutions, and unlimited updates and maintenance.