Time is up for professionals still using free or AOL mail as their business address

Many of our readers are still using free web-based e-mail like Hotmail or Yahoo! mail, or America Online (AOL) as their primary e-mailer. Soon, Google™ will offer something called GMail which will be free but will scan your e-mail for keywords and append relevant text advertisements to your messages. So, for example, if you mention an "appraisal" of "real estate" in "[your area]" in a message, the recipient may receive a text ad for real estate appraisal services in your area appended to your message – and unless you're paying Google™ to do this on your behalf, it's unlikely to be an ad for your company.

Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL have no similar plans, but all have their problems. We recommend our readers minimize their reliance on these services for their e-mailing needs. Even as pervasive as they are, @hotmail.com or @aol.com e-mail addresses still don't have the gravitas that an e-mail address of your own, including your own domain name, has. Or even a paid ISP (Internet Service Provider) address. You invest in tools that give your clients the most professional work product possible. Shouldn't that work product come from a professional sounding e-mail address?

Also, because of the ease with which these e-mail services can be used to send spam, some large companies have had to resort to filtering out any e-mail with a (for example) hotmail.com return address – and you don't want it to be yours.

While GMail's promise of lots of storage space has its competitors trying to catch up, each still has its limitations on storage space. More importantly, each has a limitation on the file size of attachments that can be sent or received, often as small as 1 megabyte. Some have restrictions on the number of e-mails you can send in a day.

Complaints about spam received by users of Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL mail have led to the implementation of sometimes overly aggressive, unintelligent spam filters that can keep you from receiving important e-mails. And the promise of user configurability is largely unfulfilled. For example, we know of Yahoo! mail users who don't receive our weekly e-Newsletters at all, ones who receive them in their "bulk mail" folder – even after they repeatedly instruct their mailbox to let the messages through to their inbox – and others who have always received it directly in their inbox, without any action on their part.

There are more than 100 million Hotmail accounts today. Any spam filter that tries to sort through the messages being received by that many people is simply going to have potential problems on the individual user level. We bet a lot of your mail talks about "mortgages," because a lot of your work is mortgage appraisal. When a free webmail service decides that anything that mentions "mortgages" is spam – which a lot of spam filters do – you may lose or have trouble finding critical, business e-mail.

The promise of easy, free e-mail accessible from any computer has brought e-mail communication to the forefront of human interaction. But you don't use your e-mail for social engineering purposes. We recommend that our readers still relying on free webmail or AOL mail wean themselves from them.