10 Top Reasons People Prefer Online Email Providers

Email is one of the quickest most convenient way to communicate, and with the plethora of Email providers available, how do you decide which one to use? Without going too deep into specific providers, you may find that Online, or Web based Email providers, are preferable to the Email provided with your ISP. Here are 10 reasons why:

1. Familiarity: It’s easy to share your email address with friends and neighbors when it’s a yahoo account or gmail or hotmail. Other email addresses provided by an ISP can have difficult to remember abbreviations that cause confusion. Contacts are often left wondering whether your address is a dot com or dot net.
2. Features: gmail, hotmail and yahoo as well as other online email providers do more than just send and receive emails. They have instant messaging services, file sharing services, and features that make your emailing a fun experience. ISP emails are usually stripped down and basic.
3. Constancy: With an online email account, you keep your address forever, as long as you want it. That means when you change ISP or move to another city or state, you do not have to change email address.
4. Pricing: Pricing? for an email service? Oh, that’s right- there is none. Online email is free. You do not have to subscribe to, and pay for Internet access through an ISP in order to have email.
5. Accessibility: No matter where you are, you can check your email. You can use your computer, your neighbor’s computer, your friend’s computer, any computer, anywhere you go, and your email is accessible.
6. Mobility: Many online email services have easy to use apps that allow you to do more than Tweet or IM on your mobile phone. You will receive notifications and even read and reply to your email from your phone, so you don’t even need to have a computer!
7. Storage: Since online email is web-based, old messages and sent messages are stored in folders on the Web. This allows you to read stored email from anywhere. The downside of ISP provided email is that your draft files and sent files, any “saved” emails are stored on your computer’s hard drive so you can only access them from your computer.
8. Space and Memory: How many emails do you save? How often do you delete old messages? With ISP provided email these files are using up space on your computer. This doesn’t happen with web-based email, so your computer can operate more efficiently.
9. Security: You will love the security of online email. Everyone either has experienced or knows someone who has experienced a hard drive crash at some time or another, and all the email, addresses, and contacts are lost causing hours of frustration and work getting things put back together again. Online email accounts do not store email on any particular computer, so there is no danger of this happening.
10. Flexibility: For people who like the way the Outlook or Novell platform work for email, your online account can be synchronized to your home computer. Once you have configured your email software for IMAP or have chosen “save copy (of messages) to the server,” you will have the best of both worlds.

It’s easy to see that, when it comes to email service, an online provider is the way to go.