An Email “Planning” Primer !!??!!??

As email is such a per­va­sive tech­nol­ogy, you might won­der why I spent time on this rel­a­tively sim­ple topic. Through an inter­est­ing series of dis­cus­sions with clients/friends over the past few months (espe­cially the past 2 weeks) — I found myself dis­cussing the impact of the fol­low­ing situations:

• The impact of mov­ing to an area where they have to change Inter­net Ser­vice Providers (ISP)
• Actions they need to take if their ISP is bought out  (or goes out of business)
• Via­bil­ity of access­ing email remotely (for exam­ple on vaca­tion and/or smart phones)
• Cre­at­ing email account names that are “appro­pri­ate” in busi­ness context

Lets go on the assump­tion that oth­ers have these ques­tions as well — or pos­si­bly didn’t even real­ize the impact of these events! So here is my start­ing tak­ing on help­ing peo­ple “Keep Pace” with Email “basics”!

Here an email, there an email .. every­where an email email …

In this day and age an indi­vid­ual can obtain email addresses in a num­ber of ways:

• From the com­pany they work at
• Asso­ci­a­tion with an edu­ca­tional entity  (i.e. an active stu­dent OR  alumni)
• Through their Inter­net provider (i.e. Com­cast, Cox, Opti­mum Online, Verizon)
• Through an inter­net based email provider  (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail/Live, etc)

But with so many addresses at your dis­posal, which one should you use the most?   First, not all email accounts are cre­ated equally:

• Some come with usage restric­tions (i.e your email at work)
• Some have lim­ited stor­age (this isn’t as applic­a­ble nowa­days, but I put it here for completeness)

And just because you have access to an email account — doesn’t mean you will always have ACCESS to that account !

• You could leave your job / get fired
• You could drop out of school
• Your Inter­net provider could be acquired
• You could move to an area ser­viced by a dif­fer­ent inter­net provider

Doc­tor it hurts when I do that .. Stop doing that !

There can be moments of “pain” asso­ci­ated with los­ing an email account.   The fol­low­ing is an extreme exam­ple, but it helps high­light some of the points I just made:

Lets say Com­cast has been your ISP and you estab­lished thisismyemail@comcast.net as your every­day email address.   Fur­ther, lets say that you use  Microsoft Out­look / Out­look Express to retrieve your emails.    Tomor­row morn­ing you get a call say­ing that your dream job is avail­able, but you will have to relo­cate to an area that is NOT ser­viced by Comcast.

1.  In your excite­ment about the new job, you not think­ing about the impact of can­cel­ing your Com­cast Ser­vice — which will end/terminate access to your Com­cast email account.

2.  You will have to estab­lish a NEW email address and start send­ing out emails to all of your friends.   How­ever should you miss some­one in your noti­fi­ca­tion email, they may have a hard time find­ing you

3.  You prob­a­bly have a large num­ber of sites where you reg­is­tered your email address (trust me — you won’t remem­ber them all).   While it may not seem impor­tant to update all of them — you will learn a painful les­son if you FORGET your pass­word to a site.    While the good news is most sites are designed to send you infor­ma­tion to retrieve your pass­word — in this case it will be sent to an email that doesn’t exist !!

This sit­u­a­tion is also sim­i­lar to the loss of a job — where you lose the con­tact infor­ma­tion of people/vendors you work with (this is why you should be using Linkedin)

No mat­ter where ya go .… there you are !

Another con­sid­er­a­tion is the abil­ity to access your email remotely.     While access­ing email accounts from a browser is not new — the increased pro­lif­er­a­tion of smart­phones (like the iPhone and the Android) allows 24×7 access to your email.  For­tu­nately all email described pre­vi­ously can be accessed remotely (but there are spe­cific issues with cor­po­rate based emails).

Once caveat — if you are cur­rently using an email client (such as Microsoft Out­look / Out­look Express)  to receive your mail AND Out­look is con­fig­ured to DELETE those emails once they are received/processed — the abil­ity to remotely access your email account will be min­i­mized — as you won’t have the abil­ity to view/search old emails.

So what would I recommend ?

There are a few things I would suggest

1.   If you aren’t using an Inter­net based email provider as your PRIMARY email, my rec­om­men­da­tion is to do so ASAP !

• Since its unlikely Google, Microsoft or Yahoo will go out of busi­ness any time soon, I would steer you in the direc­tion of these companies/providers (although my rec­om­men­da­tion is to go with Gmail)
• When cre­at­ing your account, think about select­ing an appro­pri­ate email name - while it may be funny to have an email such as reallysexymomma@gmail.com, this is NOT an account you would use in pro­fes­sional set­tings (i.e. cor­re­spond­ing for a new job)
• Once you cre­ate the account, you can start the “migra­tion” process.   Yes this is going to take some effort on your part, but it will be ben­e­fi­cial in the long run.   Some sug­gested actions include:
  • Send a note to your pri­mary con­tacts / friends from your EXISTING email account — tell them you are switch­ing emails and pro­vide them with your NEW email address.
  • Log into web sites you have reg­is­tered with (Banks, Invest­ment com­pany, Util­i­ties) and update your email address to your new address (you could con­sider cre­at­ing an account spe­cific to this func­tion as well)
  • Re-register with other sites as applic­a­ble (such as newslet­ter sites, listserv’s etc)

2.  Con­sider a sec­ond email account for those times you are reg­is­ter­ing at sites that require an email account to get more infor­ma­tion.   If you are only browsing/researching — this is a safe way of pro­tect­ing your “pri­mary” email.

3.  While it has noth­ing to do with this arti­cle, I sug­gest you refresh your­self on email ettit­quette (http://www.emailreplies.com/).   For exam­ple USING CAPITAL LETTERS WITHIN AN EMAIL IS CONSIDERED SHOUTING AND RUDE.

Whats com­ing in a future blog entry .…

Hope­fully I have peaked your inter­est into using an Inter­net based account as your pri­mary email address.   And based on some addi­tional feed­back I received, I am work­ing on a future fol­lowup blog entry that will touch upon:

• Pre­vent­ing SPAM
• Fil­ter­ing emails
• Email con­sol­i­da­tion
• Secu­rity (Using browsers on unknown com­put­ers, estab­lish­ing effec­tive passwords)

Is there any­thing else you would add to this list ??    Let me know !

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