Here at Get to the Inbox by SuretyMail we are most often asked about email service providers (ESPs) that we recommend for email marketing, but setting up your regular business email is also extremely important. Some businesses, unsure of what to do, just send their regular one-to-one business email out from a Gmail or Outlook account, but you should never use a free email account to send out your business email.
For one thing it conveys the message that we dont care very much about our own business, and if you dont care about your business, why should somebody else? For another thing, when you use a free email account, well, you get what you pay for. You also have no control over it or what happens to it.
In fact you could be blocked out of a free Gmail account, or free Outlook account, or other free account, with little or even no warning at all, and now you cant even get to your business correspondence! The irony is that using a free email provider isnt even saving your business that much money; generally speaking business email accounts run less than $10 a month, and some are much less. In some cases it just never occurred to the business to set up a business email account rather than using a free account, in other cases the person in charge of the business email just didnt know how to go about setting it up.
Regardless of the reason, its really important that email from your business come from your business, and not from Gmail, Outlook, or some other freemail provider, both for practical and technical reasons, and because it just looks bad. The email domain from which your business sends email should always match your business domain (where your website is set up), so unless the name of your business is Google or Gmail and you own google.com, a Gmail address doesnt cut it.
NOTE: Once you start using your business email account you can have the free email you were using forward to that business email, so you wont lose any email sent to your old Gmail, Outlook, or other address. Setting up business email to match your website domain or other business domain isnt difficult, any of the below email services that we recommend can help you get set up. But even before checking out the below email services, nearly all domain registrars offer hosted business email services. So, for example, if you registered example.com through GoDaddy, GoDaddy will also let you have email addresses at example.com, with a webmail interface, and usually for free (included with your domain registration). But if you dont want to go that route, here are business email services that we recommend.
Business Email Hosts that We Recommend
The following business email hosts are well-known and respected in the industry, and have confirmed to us that they offer setup support, including with email authentication (SPF, etc.). If they also provide domain registration or website hosting, they have confirmed that they offer business email even if the business does not have their domain registered or hosted with them.
FastMail
One.com
CityEmail
Zoho
GoDaddy
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