Quick note: the dangers of free email services
By Paul Biba
I had never thought of this before but it makes perfect sense. Here’s a tip from Marilynn Byerly’s Adventures in Writing:
Since AOL has become a free service, they have been attaching graphic advertising at the bottom. Most of the other freebies do as well.
Why is this a problem? Many editors and agents clearly state in their guidelines that they delete any email unread that has an attachment.
Others in the business have spam filters which will probably delete your email when it arrives.
If you want your query or submission read, use a paid email service that doesn’t attach ads.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
For that matter, some places reject any e-mail that comes from free e-mail sites regardless of whether or not there are attachments, just because of how trivial it is for anyone to whack up an account.
Just to be on the safe side, I have my gmail account set to use my eyrie.org mailbox as my From: address.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
AOL has sucked since the first day it began, a lesson I learned years ago. If you’d asked me I’d have told you to avoid them.
Yahoo and Google don’t add images to emails.
As far as this attitude against free email sites, I wish people would understand . . .
1. The email provided by my isp SUCKS big time. I hate it and don’t use it.
2. free email can be a more permanent address than isp email. My sister and her family move a lot and she is always sending me her new email address. If she’d just use yahoo mail it’d remain the same. I have used the same yahoo account for about ten years, and I’ve switched isp’s a few times during the same years. My email address remains the same.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:15 am
I don’t think free email sites are good for anyone using email for a business, be it writing books or anything else. We certainly don’t recommend them to clients as there is no guarantee of security.
The big advantage of Gmail etc is that it can be used as a “public” email address, signing up for newsletters etc to keep all that spam out of your business account!
Why anyone uses AOL is beyond me, do they have extra features in USA which makes it worthwhile?
August 11th, 2009 at 11:59 am
If your online, free email service allows it (yahoo does, not sure about gmail but I imagine they do), set your preferences in composing to ’send plain text only.’
This solves the problem mentioned: ads are included, but as simple lines of text at the bottom, not as attachments.