Aside from a computer or mobile device itself, and the choice of browser one uses on it, an email account is far and away the most important tool for computing and Internet access, that you can have. It’s not only a quick and easy correspondence tool, it’s the key that can unlock any number of services or sites you use on the Internet.
It’s hard to think of email as something you might need in an emergency, but it’s true: You may have to recover another online account and might be sent (for example) a password-reset link, a one-time password, verification code, etc. In those cases, you need your email account to be easily accessed and quick to show you incoming mail.
For this reason, the choice of an email address to use, matters a great deal. You need to have an email account that’s reliable, above all else, and that you can get assistance with, if something should go wrong with it.
You’ll often hear email is “the Internet’s ‘killer app’” and there’s a reason for that. Email is what got the Internet off the ground in the business world, even before the World Wide Web existed. It’s incredibly important and central to your online life. It should be treated as such.
Free email accounts, such as those offered by Google (Gmail), Yahoo, Microsoft (Hotmail, Live.com, Outlook.com), AOL, Apple (iCloud, .Me, Mac.com), Mail.Com, Zoho Mail, and others, can be useful, convenient, and are nice to have. All have easily-accessible Web interfaces; they also work with most email clients, especially on mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad, etc.).
But as economists are so eager to tell us, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the same is true with free email accounts. You, the account holder, and your data are the commodity that pays for your email account. These services can read your mail (they have to, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to send or receive the messages), and can use that information to advertise to you. Also, over the past few years, all of those emails have been fed into AI networks to provide digital fodder for the likes of ChatGPT, Grok, Copilot, Gemini, and more.
Beyond these privacy considerations, though, there’s another to keep in mind: You’ll get no true tech support for any of those, beyond a tech support Web site and, if you’re lucky, a chatbot to spit canned answers at you. If for some reason you can’t access your email, or send a message, or something else, it’s on you to get the problem resolved. Or, to sit and wait for an outage to be resolved — assuming they’re even up-front about there being an outage, in the first place.
When the Internet first became a thing that people could access from home, the Internet providers they signed up with typically provided one or more email addresses with domains reflecting the provider’s name.
This is actually how AOL got into the business of providing email. It might be hard to recall, but AOL was a dial-up Internet provider long before it became a massive Web portal. Aside from that, you sometimes see comcast.net addresses, along with att.net, cox.net, charter.net, verizon.net, and more.
If your ISP provides email services as part of your Internet-access account, then you’ll be able to get tech support for it, if something goes awry. Accounts like this are fine. In the past we’ve recommended people use these, and in a lot of cases they can be depended upon.
But having said that … some ISPs are dropping their own in-house email services. The accounts and the email domains still exist, but have been sold off to another provider like Yahoo, AOL, etc. which just places users back into that big nameless hopper with all the rest of the free email account holders left to fend for themselves.
One of the more recent ISPs to get out of the business of providing email service to its customers, is Cox. Anyone out there who has Cox, has by now been notified their email hosting is being moved. Pay attention to the information Cox sends you about this transition, because without it, you may end up being locked out of your cox.net mailbox.
In the case of ISPs who’ve offloaded their email services, there’s no benefit to keeping the account, because there’s no real-time assistance, should you need it.
This brings me to a problem that’s very common here in Connecticut. Many people in “the Land of Steady Habits” first got access to the Internet through SNET (later, SBC, and later, AT&T). They were given email accounts by them, as their ISP (whether it was using dial-up access, or DSL, or near the end of their time in this state, U-verse).
Nearly all of those folks have moved on to broadband from a cable company, or fiber service of some kind, or even satellite; but they’ve kept their email addresses with domains like snet.net, sbcglobal.net, or att.net. People and businesses continue to use them, years or even decades after they ceased doing business with SNET/SBC/AT&T.
All of those relationships — every last one of them! — were severed forever a number of years ago, when in 2014, Frontier Communications bought AT&T’s landline and ISP business in Connecticut. However, those email accounts have, for the most part, continued to work. And people keep using them … and using them and using them and using them.
We know all the reasons why, too. “Everyone knows that address! It’s in everything I’ve got! It’s a pain in the neck to change it! I don’t have time for it.” Folks here in Connecticut tend to be creatures of habit, moreso than in other places, hence the state’s nickname.
To be clear: We very much understand this! We hear you, really. But seriously, those old addresses have to go. They just do.
Something that’ll make it even harder to get rid of these addresses, is that as of 2018, it’s no longer possible to forward them automatically to another address. Automatic forwarding is no longer available for those SNET/SBC/AT&T accounts. Even if you’d configured them to forward, prior to 2018, they no longer will do so.
The metaphorical switch could be pulled on any or all of those accounts, at any moment … and it might never come back, because even though the account is still being hosted, literally there is no longer any company technically or legally responsible for keeping it alive.
True story: We know of people who have lost these accounts and were never able to reclaim them. They are dead. Gone. Poof! Bye-bye. No more. Sayonara. The Internet equivalent of black holes. The folks who were using them, of course, were caught unawares and had to scramble to do something about it. It’s virtually guaranteed they failed to get at least some important emails in the few days following their demise.
Don’t let that happen to you! Come up with a plan to use another address, now, and then implement it. Here’s how to proceed:
It will take persistence and diligence. It’ll be annoying. It might take weeks or even months to divest yourself from the old address. But the sooner you get it done — while that old address is still alive and working — the better off you’ll be.
The key to having reliable email service is to have one that you somehow are paying for and which is actively supported. For those whose ISPs are still providing their own in-house email, you can continue with that — but keep in mind that your ISP could divest from its email services at any time.
Another option is to use paid editions of the free services I mentioned near the beginning. If you have Gmail, consider signing up for a Google One plan. If you have an Outlook.com account, consider signing up for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family. You’ll get additional benefits with those options, such as cloud storage (or an increase to a modest “free” amount of storage), and in the case of Microsoft 365, the use of installed Office apps, among other things. But, a side benefit is, you can obtain tech support for the services you get, which would include your email account.
Zoho also offers a paid email plan, and so too do other “cloud” providers such as Godaddy, Inmotion, Bluehost, and Hostgator. If you work with any of those, you’ll be fine. They all provide tech support, at least to a certain point.
Another type of email are the “secure email” services. The concept of “secure email” can be complicated, especially because it can apply internally (i.e. concerning how the mailbox data is stored, as well as how it’s accessed by email clients) and externally (i.e. how email messages, themselves, are sent to their destinations) in different ways.
For better or worse, even the most secure “secure email” service can only do just so much to “secure” the email messages they send to external destinations. It’s much less common than just a few years ago, but there are some email hosts that aren’t capable of receiving all of the emails sent to them using secure SSL/TLS transmission between email servers. However, most of the large email hosts will only accept mail that’s sent via SSL/TLS, and the list of those is growing. Over the next few years, it’ll become all but impossible for any email host to send messages in any other way.
One of the better — and more economical, for reasons I’ll get to shortly — “secure email” services is Proton. It’s based in Switzerland, whose legal system offers privacy protections that are more strict even than the European Union, which itself has privacy standards in excess of what’s found in the United States or most other countries. Email messages are encrypted as they’re received; they’re encrypted as often as possible when they’re sent; and mailbox data (aka email data “at rest”) is encrypted. Even the sysadmins at Proton can’t read your email.
The only way to access your email data at Proton is via your own account, which only you have the credentials to.
An advantage of a Proton Mail account is that it’s a “Proton” account … which includes Proton VPN and Proton Drive storage. There is also a free level of service (with no human tech support) which provides a basic level of service that many home users will find adequate, but there are higher tiers of service. But all of these levels (including the free level) provides additional features such as VPN, file storage, and more.
For this reason we recommend Proton Mail (and Proton VPN, Proton Drive, etc.). Between Proton’s security practices, country of origin, and features offered, you’ll get more for your money — even at the “free” (as in, zero cost) level. Go to https://proton.me to see what’s offered there.
An added feature of most Proton plans is that you can have your own email domain. For instance, the Joneses might be able to get their mail at person@jonesfamily.com. The upshot is that you’ll have to acquire an Internet domain from the registrar of your choice, then configure its zone records (e.g. MX records) to point to Proton’s email service.
Proton provides information as to how to go about that. It’s very clear and specific, and is easy to handle. Just pay attention to the details, and you will do fine.
For a custom email domain — if you choose to go that route — we suggest using Godaddy (https://www.godaddy.com/) to purchase and manage your domain. They’ll be nearly as inexpensive as the most inexpensive registrar you’ll find; but you’ll also find that if you need to make changes to your DNS records, they’ll be propagated to the rest of the Internet about as quickly as can be.
We’ve grown far beyond the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when one had to track down, download, install, and spend time configuring an email client, to read one’s email. All of the free and paid email services mentioned so far provide the ability to access email via a Web browser, which can be found preinstalled on any computer (Edge on Windows PCs; Safari on Mac OS, iPhones, and iPads; Chrome on Android devices; and Chrome OS itself can open websites on Chromebooks).
Windows PCs have the Outlook (New) app (formerly Windows Mail). Macs have Apple Mail. Mobile devices all have built-in Mail apps of one kind or another. You shouldn’t have too much trouble connecting any email account you have, to whichever one of these is available to you on the device you’re using.
Still, you may want choices … and they’re available. On computers (Windows and Mac OS), check out the following:
The Apple (iPhone & iPad) App Store and Google Play Market for Android devices offer additional email clients, including some of the above (eM Client, Outlook, and Canary). Samsung’s Galaxy Market also has email clients available.
Nearly all of these email clients will allow you to connect to your email accounts easily. If server and account settings are needed, consult tech support for the service that hosts your email account. (This is one of the many reasons to make sure you have real, live tech support available.)
Our advice is to experiment with these. Find the one that works best for you, then use it.
Note, if you take our advice and get yourself a Proton email account, you can get to it via any Web browser, and they now have dedicated applications (which are email clients) for Android, iPhone/iPad, Windows, and Mac OS. It doesn’t get easier than that. If you wish to keep using another client with your Proton account, they provide a secure connector which will allow the client to get to your Proton mailbox.
A final note about email clients: Outlook (New) on Windows 11 until recently, had been Windows Mail. Confusingly, this not the Classic Outlook email client which is familiar to business users. It is, instead, a locally-installed edition of Microsoft’s Web-email interface or OWA (Outlook Web Access). As such, it has limited features compared with the actual Outlook. But you may like it better than the existing free Windows Mail.
At the risk of being a sales pitch for Proton (and, maybe, Godaddy) … what we really want is for you to have 1) an email service that’s 100% under your own control; and 2) that you can get help with, if something goes awry. Gmail and AOL are great, but there’s no one at either company you can ask to help you out, in a pinch. That’s just not going to happen, unless you’re a paying customer for either.
Also, even though I’ve just spent a lot of words convincing you not to use a free email service (such as Gmail), I suggest creating a free Gmail (or Hotmail or Yahoo or Zoho Mail) account as an additional recovery option for whichever service you end up purchasing or using as your primary email address. Just as you may need your main email address to reset, say, your Amazon account password, you might also need another email address to recover your “main” email account, wherever it might be housed.
The Internet, as you may or may not realize by now, is all about redundancy and confirmation. For that reason, oddly enough, you should always have at least two different email addresses you can get to, and set each one up as a recovery option for the other. That’s the best Internet insurance that money can (or can’t, as the case may be) buy.