Personal Customized Email
You may have caught our previous blog post introducing custom email addresses and we briefly touched on using a customized email address for personal use, away from your business.
Most people will be quite happy with using a free email managing service such as Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo. These are very easy to spot as they will have the appropriate extensions @gmail.com, @outlook.com, and @yahoo.com.
While on the surface these might appear like free services, it is important to remember that you are paying for them, just not with money.
What is the real cost of free email?
Your Privacy – You Are the Product with Free Email Services
We have gotten pretty used to using “free” services online—taking social media as the prime example—where you consent to share your data in exchange.
You ever wonder why you get an email about a product or service and later when you are ‘surfing the web’ you start to see ads for those same products and services? That is from scanning your emails. If you are fine with that keep using the service, if you are not, maybe you should use an email service for critical things like banking, financing things in your life, and other important subjects you do not want big tech going plundering through. It’s time to get an email service that the only thing it scans for is only viruses and malware and nothing else.
Take Google as an example, Gmail will allow you to create a free email address with a big 15GB mailbox and 20MB attachments in exchange for the right to scan the contents of your emails and target ads to you based on the type of emails you send and receive. Other free email services are the same.
So, other than handing over your data and privacy (if that isn’t reason alone), what are the main issues with using a free service from one of the big tech giants?
- Your cloud storage will be very limited.
- Your mailbox will often be littered with advertising banners and/or paid promotion emails that sit within your mailbox.
- If you are connecting the email to your website or the services you offer, visitors to your website or blog could easily be put off by a perceived lack of professionalism and authenticity.
- Because the contents of your emails are scanned, you will often notice that after receiving certain commercial emails you will find the same or related products/services advertised when surfing the web.
Why do you need a personal customized email?
It’s important to state that not everyone requires a personal customized email outside of their business. This is because many of us use email for quite simple purposes such as keeping in touch with friends and family, or in using online services.
However, a large number of people may discuss sensitive information or generally prefer to retain higher levels of privacy in their online communications with people and their financial institutions.
Utilize multiple mailboxes
Being able to split your email into multiple mailboxes allows you to use one for personal correspondence and one specifically for financial and very sensitive information.
This second email address will be one that you NEVER give out to any outside mailing lists unless it is a financial site or one containing sensitive information. It is effectively your private email address.
You can further increase the anonymity of this secret email address by using an encrypted user name that would look something like i487kcv@mydomainname.com. Here the first characters are “randomly” generated, in a similar way to how you would use a suggested password for some websites.
You can add additional mailboxes to any KloudEmail service and we provide a discount for additional mailboxes. Helping anyone wanting to create a private email address or mailbox.
Email aliases
Email aliases allow you to set up special email addresses for different purposes. They are ideal for when you want to sign up for email newsletters, special offers, or any promotional service that requires your email address. Plus, this way they never know your true email address.
Let’s imagine that you are entering an online contest. You can set up an email alias like contest@mydomainname.com and then you will know exactly where any emails received from this alias are coming from. This is hugely important when it comes to identifying what companies are selling your email to third parties against your consent.
We would generally ALWAYS recommend you unsubscribe from lists that you sign up for promotional purposes.
The issue is that sometimes when you select to unsubscribe, you will still receive emails either from the company or from a partner who has already acquired your email from the company you first shared it with.
Then, the best thing about an email alias is that you can easily remove it. And that’s it! No more emails from that person or company.
This is a level of control that you quite simply cannot have using a standard free email service. It begs the question, why would you want your email to operate any other way!
There are just so many different ways to use email aliases, especially when you get unlimited email aliases with any KloudEmail service from KartHost.
Increased spam and virus protection
In addition to creating multiple aliases to manage who has access to your email, by using almost any private hosting service, you will also benefit from increased spam and virus protection.
Whether it is for personal or professional use, the benefits of increased virus protection are hugely important in protecting both your personal and private data and in protecting the contents of your hard drive from potential attacks from bad actors.
Better Privacy of Emails in Your Mailbox
Absolutely no harvesting of your data, making you the product. You are paying for the service, it’s your data and no one else. Think of it as your private space.
Improved deliverability
If you are sending out bulk emails to people on your list from a free email service, you are effectively relying on the reputation of the provider (@gmail.com, @hotmail.com, etc) for the delivery.
This probably sounds quite strange, and something you might not have considered before, but it is very common for dodgy marketers and scam companies to use free email providers to create accounts and therefore your email is likely to get moved to the spam folder.
This is because the domain (Gmail.com, Hotmail.com, etc) will want to protect their reputation as they cannot vouch for the quality of the content. Plus, understandably, they don’t want to be associated with large-scale marketing campaigns.
Even with Custom Email, you shouldn’t send out large amounts of email, email marketing services like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Send in Blue, and others are best used for this. However, using your customized email with your own domain name brings you to a higher level of credibility with those that do not know you are a legitimate business.
Build your personal brand
While customized email addresses are generally used by businesses, many individuals—especially budding entrepreneurs and solopreneurs—can benefit from building their personal brand image.
If you take social media as a prime example, the concept of building a personal brand regardless of your specialist sector or interest area is becoming increasingly popular. It can also have great benefits for freelancers or individuals looking to build a side hustle alongside their main source of income.
As with using a customized email for your business, it demonstrates to anyone you share your email address with that you are a professional who is serious about what they do. It can also prove to be a great lead generation tool if you also have a blog or website that will of course be associated with your email address via the domain name.
Assert yourself with a personal customized email
The benefits of having a personal customized email address should not only be reserved for businesses, especially when the potential benefits can make such a difference to your privacy, data security, personal brand, and your online experience in general!
At KartHost, we are committed to making the best online experience accessible to everyone and we welcome any questions or concerns you may have.
We have also built-in handy tools to our website to help better inform your decisions, particularly the free domain name checker and an email service quiz to help you find the best plan for your needs.
