Having a corporate email address with your companies domain name in it has long been the sign of a high tech company.  You can contact everyone that works at StarReviews by using our first name at starreviews.com (Arthur (a) starreviews dot com) but with the cool email address, comes issues, mostly related to delivery of emails to customers and business partners.   With the ever growing spam issue, companies have implemented many different spam blocking protocols that have had the side effect of blocking legitimate emails.

When internet businesses send emails to customers as receipts or marketing material to potential business partners, there is a high propensity for these emails to get blocked.   Spam blocking generally blocks emails by characteristics of the email or possibly by IP address or IP Blocks and also by domain name.  Many corporations use spam block lists which are lists of domains that have had the characteristics of sending spam.  These block lists are maintained by various companies with no oversight and no appeal process so if you get on one of these lists, it can negatively affect your business.

So with all these headaches and the potential downside of having your own email address, what do you do?  Many companies are turning to the  larger email hosting companies like Yahoo, Hotmail and Google for email hosting.  Using email address like starreviews@gmail.com to receive and send  corporate email addresses and even using personal email addresses for corporate purposes.  The use of these addresses used to show that you were not a “real” tech company. However, in todays environment  the utilization of free email services for corporate purposes has become commonplace. 

Before You Use A Free Email Service:

• Setup a naming convention for your company and employees and stick to it (i.e.: barackobamausa (a) yahoo.com)
• Select one service for the whole company
• NEVER use cute or inappropriate email addresses for business (singleandlooking (a) gmail.com is not appropriate for business)
• As a corporation, create the corporate email addresses for your employees so you own them when they leave the company

There are many challenges that doing business on the internet has spawned and email delivery is a major one.   The wide acceptance of using free email services for corporate purposes has become an acceptable solution to the email delivery issue.