I totally disagree.
There is no badge of honor in email snobbery. Very few people if any really care about a particular email address. In fact, the only place I ever saw any actual snobbery in email addresses are in sign forums. Never once did I ever see or hear any disparagement of any one using a free email account in any other marketing forum or in actual usage.
I would like to see some actual statistics on email addresses verses free addresses. I personally never even heard of it except in sign forums.
Techman, perhaps you should do some research. If you have an AOL email address, then all your email runs through their servers. AOL has one of the largest blacklists of outside email servers in the business. So what's that mean?
It means if someone out there is on a shared server, like most small businesses are, then you are sharing a server with 100's of other people. That server has an address, more or less. Now, if you are doing nothing wrong, and everyone's getting your email, all is good. But what happens is that 1 person, yes, 1 person, on that server registers an account and uses that account to spam people, then AOL shuts off all email from that entire server. Done, over. So now those 100's of people on the server can no longer send email to AOL. It will reject it. Not send it to spam, it will REJECT it.
So, as someone that needs to send email to people with AOL, now what do you do? You don't own the server, so you have no control over who's sharing the server. Contact AOL and they'll tell you to stop sending spam from that server. Call the server company you pay a whopping $5 a month for, and they, most likely will tell you nothing and do nothing.
I used to have an online store for a part time business. I had it happen to me. I lost all my customers with AOL because I couldn't send them email. I switched to a dedicated server, so I was the only one, but turns out AOL had blocked the entire bank of servers coming from that facility.
So it's not "email snobbery", it's called making sure that you can openly and freely communicate with your customers, and you cannot do that with AOL customers.
That's the email side of it, not to mention, google is indexing all those emails you share on their servers. Not sure I want google to know the content of all my emails, but I'm a paranoid person.
So you're telling me that if 2 people send you a brochure for a service and they are :
Bob's Electrical Service
www.aol.com/hometown/ee5hy/bobtheelectrian/free/hompage.html
bob898765@aol.com
555-555-1212 (leave a message)
and
Superior Electrical Service
www.superiorelectric.com
service@superiorelectric.com
555-555-1212
You'd call Bob's?
I wouldn't.
