Why your Business Needs Domain-Based Email Instead of Free Email Accounts

When you are starting a business, the amount of information you need to be aware of is overwhelming. There are hundreds of decisions to make, items to implement and ways to spend the limited money you have to get off the ground. There are plenty of ways to be strategic and save money that will not hurt your business or waste your money in the long run. However, using free email accounts to represent your business with your clients is not one of the ways you should save your business money.

This post discusses why your business needs domain-based email instead of free email accounts.

Why your Business Needs Domain-Based Email Instead of Free Email Accounts

Choosing to use a free email account, such as MyNewBusiness@ gmail/me/hotmail/yahoo/comcast/sbcglobal/att (.net or .com) is a risky choice for your business. While you can switch to domain-based email at a later time, you have already introduced risk and it will be a challenge to get people to switch to the new email account.

When you use a free email account, for demonstration purposes, let's assume we create MyBusinessName@FreeEmailProvider.com, rather than creating a domain-based email like MyName@MyNewBusiness.com:

You increase the likelihood that someone will impersonate your emails: Someone can easily create another email account, such as MyBusinessName@AnotherFreeEmailProvider.com and begin sending emails to your client list. Your clients are less likely to notice the change because the email account still begins with your business name and you have already used email that was not domain-based.

If someone did notice, they would likely assume you switched email providers or created a secondary free email account. This makes them more likely to trust the sender, to open the email, and possibly click links or open attachments.

You increase the amount of time it would take to recover from the account being hacked: If the email account gets hacked, it will take longer for you to recover than if you were using domain-based email. Free email accounts do not include access to customer service to help you recover your account when there is an issue. Additionally, they do not have administrative accounts that you can use to get back into them.

Domain-based email accounts also have an administrative account that is used just for managing the email accounts. These administrative accounts can be used to regain access to an account if it was hacked and someone has locked you out of the account. This account is a master account that can configure the other accounts and is your way of regaining access when something goes wrong but they do not exist with free email accounts.

You make it unlikely your email will be whitelisted: When you use free email accounts and you want to send emails, it is much more challenging to get users to "whitelist" your email account. Whitelisting means being added to a list where the rule says always "trust this sender". This allows you to send emails to clients without being blocked as spam even if your content might otherwise appear to be spam.

Nobody is going to whitelist gmail/me/hotmail/yahoo/comcast/sbcglobal/att (.net or .com) because they would receive so much SPAM the mailbox would be rendered useless. When you use domain-based email accounts, you can easily ask clients to whitelist @mynewbusinessdomain.com, which is unique to only your business.

While you could ask clients to whitelist specific email addresses like MyBusinessName@FreeEmailProvider.com, this is often more challenging to accomplish, if possible at all.

Using domain-based email rather than email accounts from free providers, when it comes to a business, is extremely important. As the list above shows, there are a great number of increased security threats that exist when using free email accounts.

On the contrary, using domain-based email increases security protections, including but not limited to the following:

1. The ability for users to easily whitelist your email accounts.
2. An admin account that allows you to recover accounts if something bad has happened. This can include an internal user locking you out of your own email account or the account being hijacked, etc.
3. The ability to proactively remove your emails from blacklists if you get blocked because an account was hacked and used to send spam.
4. The confidence of recipients that your emails are truly coming from your business because the email accounts are domain-based and only you should own the domain linked to your business.
5. The ability to configure and manage security policies related to email being sent and received.

While it can be tempting to use free email accounts for your new business to save a few dollars, from a security perspective, this is never recommended. There are a great deal of security risks introduced when using free email accounts, and an even greater list of security protections provided by implementing domain-based emails from the start.

The increased level of protections provided by domain-based emails far outweighs the minimal cost of using them for your business. This is especially true if you had to spend precious time trying to regain control of a free email account, notify customers that you were hacked, or simply migrating to a new email account.

As always, knowing the true cost of your business decisions is key in making an educated choice, and in protecting your business data, which is one of your most important assets.