Email accounts can be divided into two types – paid and free. Paid email accounts include those provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), those provided as part of your website hosting, and those which are made available for an annual or monthly charge. Free email services include Gmail and Hotmail; and some services provide both free and paid accounts, for example, AOL and ATT.
When everyone needed a lot of help with their email, paid providers made a lot of sense. You would contact your email provider and they would help you set up your account, reset your password, and deal with any other difficulties. As email use has become more and more of a commodity, many people started using the free email services. A major reason for having a free account was that they web-based and could be accessed from any computer, not just your own.
But there is a downside to using a free account. There is very little support for a free account. This fact was brought to my attention again as I tried to get assistance for a client who couldn’t remember her password. After spending almost 2 hours on the phone with support (OK, about half the time was on hold as we were switched between support personnel), I realized we weren’t getting anywhere. Luckily, the problem was that Internet Explorer knew the password, but my client preferred using an email client. For some reason, the email program had lost the password.
Fortunately, we were able to use a specialized tool to recover the password. But if this were not the case, my client would have had to get a new email address and notify all of her contacts of the change.
The Bottom Line: Treat your passwords with care and make sure that you have them in a secure place. You never know when you might need to look them up. You don’t want to lose access to your email.
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