I can think of no time when mailing out from a free email account is appropriate. Always use a domain-based email account. However, using them to receive mail is often appropriate and even preferred.

One good example is for safelist use. To mail to a safelist you must be a member. All members get anywhere from a handful to literally thousands of emails each day! You could spend your entire day sorting these messages from the vital emails you need in your business. Therefore you need to keep them separate.

Each safelist you join will ask you for two email addresses, usually called “list” and “contact” addresses. Both these addresses can and probably should be free email addresses. I highly recommend Gmail for these, as it is accepted by all (some free email providers are not accepted), and has some great features to make your safelist email processing easy.

Your “list” address will get a lot of mail every day, especially if you’re a member of multiple safelists. Be sure and visit it regularly to read what looks interesting and delete the rest.

Your “contact” address is for the administrators of the safelists to contact you with special promotions or other necessary information, but it is also used for advertising emails, sometimes a lot. You’ll want to look at this one a little more closely before deleting the emails inside.

You’ll also find that you must go through a lot of squeeze pages as you look for information on the web. You might want to set up yet another free account to handle these. This way you can read the emails for a while and change to one of your own email addresses for those senders who are really sending you valuable information that you can use. The rest you can just delete on a regular basis.

Why Not Remove?

I’ve recommended getting free email addresses rather than bogging down your regular email accounts for certain types of email activity. Some people prefer to use their everyday email addresses to receive these, then request to be removed from the list when they find the emails to be not useful.

The problem with this is that some unscrupulous emailers will sell or give away your address to someone else, or even just put you on a different mailing list of their own when you do this. Instead of getting less mail, suddenly you’re getting much more! I don’t even bother with removals anymore. I do my best to keep my own email addresses clean from people I don’t know and trust.