[admin]

JCS offers an email-only plan for people who don't need a website but still require email service, but why would you PAY for email when you can get it for FREE in many places like with Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail?

Well, it really all depends on your needs and expectations. We all know there's really no such thing as "free". Everything has a cost. It may not come out of your wallet each month, but there's definitely a cost. You simply need to figure out if the "costs" are worth it to you.

Here are some "costs" associated with free email services...

• Spam - Free email services receive a disproportionate amount of Spam. The fact is you'll get much more Spam with a free email service than with a paid email providor.
  
  
• Virus Attachments - Free email accounts receive lots of attachments, and many of those contain a virus. How do you know what's safe to open? Free accounts don't have a built-in anti-virus program.
  
  
• Deliverability - A large percentage of Spam originates from free email accounts. Even though it is not actually you sending the Spam, you'll still be punished for it. When Spam filters see your email as coming from the same provider as lots of Spam, it's a strike against you, and can quickly cause your email to be blocked.
  
  
• Customer Service - Hey, you get what you pay for, right? While free email providers may have web forms and email address to take your questions, your chances of getting a response are pretty much proportional to what you paid: zero.
  
  
• Unwanted Content - Ads. It's how the free services make their money, and they make sure those ads are right in your face all the time. Did you know they even "read" your email messages to discover what ad content may be most relevant to you? Yup. That's so you'll click on those ads more often and make them more money.
  
  
• Privacy - An additional source of revenue for some free service providers is to sell and/or trade your information with other organizations. This can include your name, your email address, the email addresses in your address book, or any of the information in your profile. When going free, your privacy is at risk.
  
  
• Limits and Restrictions - With most free services you must read your email through their web interface. If you want to move, forward or download your email, contacts or other information, the process is cumbersome, if it's even possible at all. With JCS, you can read email online, download it to an email program, or both. The choice is yours.
  
  
• No Backups - What if the free service has a hard drive failure? What if someone hacks into your account? There are no backups with the freebies. With the JCS plan, you can backup your email and contacts anytime you wish, plus our servers run automated backups EVERY DAY!
  
  
• Unprofessional Image - Last, but probably most important. If you run a business and use a free email service, or even if you use your local ISP's email for that matter, you are telling your customers that you don't care about email or using the Internet to communicate with them. That perception might be wrong, but using a free email account doesn't say that you are deeply devoted to your Internet-using customers. A free email account says, "we're not willing to take the relatively small expense to make sure we have reliable email." Any business, large or small, should have their own Internet domain name and handle their email using that domain. "company@hotmail.com" will always look cheaper and less professional than "anything@company.com". Not to mention that "company@hotmail.com" is more likely to have technical problems without anyone to help you resolve them.
  

Simply put, you should never use a free email service for anything that you consider important, or anything that you want to keep long term.

Here's how to judge if free email is for you:
If the free email account went away completely tomorrow, along with all the mail and contact information it contains, would it be an inconvenience or a catastrophe? If the latter, then you need to get away from your free account, now.

If your email is actually important to you, then spend a little bit each month to get a "real" email account. Each of the "costs" listed above will be diminished, if not eliminated.


So what are free accounts good for?

Free accounts are perfect when you don't really care what happens to them. They're great when you need to supply an email address to a company that you think may Spam you later, if you need or want to remain anonymous or keep that email separate, or for leaving as a contact address on a website that will probably get harvested for spam someday.

In other words, free email accounts are perfect throw away accounts. If you get something important that you want to save on one of those accounts, just forward it to your real email address for safe keeping.
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JCS Support Team

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