MANAGING MULTIPLE EMAIL ACCOUNTS

By Tiburon Technology
Posted Wednesday, November 24, 2004

If you have been doing business online for any amount of time, you have likely discovered the usefulness of using several email accounts at the same time.

Take for example those of us who use email on our jobs. We often have an email address for work and one for personal stuff. There are times when we are at home and need to check our email from work and vice versa.

Online marketers are a special breed of Internet users. People who have been doing online marketing for any length of time often have several email accounts. They have a couple of POP email accounts, and often have several web-based email accounts.

Now, if you are sitting at your computer reading this now and wondering what the point of having multiple email addresses is, then I will answer that for you now.

As a marketer with a website, you will want to submit your site to search engines. Unfortunately for us, each time we submit something to the search engines, search engine companies want to send us first a thank you message and then they want to follow that up with more email that advertises something for one of their clients. After all, search engines are supported these days primarily by advertising dollars.

Most new marketers on the web have an additional inflow of email to contend with. Not understanding that FFA sites will not help their businesses, they post endlessly to these sites to try to get the word out. A single submission run to the FFA sites could avalanche your email account. Generally, FFA site owners have an autoresponder attached to their FFA site. When you make a submission to their site, they in turn send you an email hawking their wares. Sometimes, they will send you several follow-up emails for your one submission.

For the FFA site owner, it is not really spam because they told you at their FFA site you would be added to their mailing list when you submitted. Since you likely used software to make the submission, you did not know that.

Though the possibility exists that you can get one email for every FFA site submitted to, the reality is that you will get one email for every six sites submitted to.

Now here is a trap that even experienced marketers fall into. Some software packages and websites advertise they will submit your URL to hundreds of thousands of "Search Engines." The URL submission industry is notorious for making this one misrepresentation. The truth is that there are not hundreds of thousands of search engines!

According to (http://www.searchengineguide.com/), there are 3,681 engines in their directory. Granted, they may not have every search engine on the planet listed, but I am willing to bet that they are close. Further, the majority of search engines you will find listed at SearchEngineGuide.com are specialized search engines that will not list every kind of site on the web. That means that of the 3,681 search engines available to be listed in, only a portion of those are available for your own use.

So, you must remember that when you hear a website or a software company suggesting "that they will submit your URL to hundreds of thousands of Search Engines," they are misrepresenting their product. When you note someone making this sort of claim, you can bet they are submitting your URL to primarily FFA sites, if not only FFA sites.

FFA sites are not search engines. They are merely a list of links on a single page. Each list of links only has enough room on it for so many links, usually 1,000 links. When a new one is added to the top of the list, the link on the bottom of the list is dropped.

Now that you understand the nature of URL submissions, I think you can appreciate the value of at least one junk email account to be listed with any URL submissions. Internet marketers generally have at least one web-based email account to be used alongside their primary email account. This web-based account allows for the URL submission thank you emails from the search engines and from the FFA site owners to be received, while at the same time not junking up their primary email account.

While it is not possible to detail all of the different reasons a marketer would use more than one email account in their Internet marketing activities within the scope of this article, I will try to outline a couple more.

Take for example if you're using an ezine or newsletter to court your potential customer base. In most cases, you'd want to have a distinct email address to be used only for your publications. In this manner, when someone writes to you as the editor of a publication, you might feel that is important to keep those contacts in a separate email account. More than anything, this is a matter of organization. It is often far easier to keep your business in order, when you have separate email accounts for each activity.

Another reason you might want an additional email account is the rampant use of email harvesting software by spammers. Any email address used to submit a classified ad posting, a newsgroup discussion posting, or to be used on a website is a good target for the email harvesting software that is in use.

With the subject of email harvesting software, the addresses that you use, you might actually want to check from time to time in case there is really something important coming in amidst the spam flooding your email account.

The uses for multiple email accounts are as numerous as the activities that you might pursue on the Internet.

While there is value in employing more than one email account, there are also downsides. While quite a few of your email accounts will enable forwarding of the mail to your primary address, this often defeats the purpose of killing the mass of junk mail to your account.

Even though you have protected your primary email account from the garbage mail, and you have organized your activities into separate email accounts, the biggest downside is that you now have several of email accounts to monitor, and that takes time, lots of time.

Fortunately, there is a tool available to help you recoup the time you have now lost maintaining these multiple email accounts. With the ePrompterT software, you can now check the email from your POP accounts and most of your web-based email accounts at the same time. What's more is that you can leave your ePrompterT running in the background and it can check mail from all of your multiple accounts, and through an icon in the Systray, you will stay abreast on how many emails you have sitting in your various accounts. ePrompterT will also permit you to read and delete the email sitting on your mail server, with only a few clicks of your mouse. There are far too many features in this handy little tool to describe them all here.

ePrompterT is freeware and can be downloaded from (http://www.eprompter.com) . ePrompterT is the great equalizer. It is now time to take back all of the time you lost when the FFA site owners and spammers convinced you that you needed to have more than one email address.

About the Author
Tiburon Technology, Inc. is the maker of the ePrompter software. (http://www.eprompter.com) Use ePrompterT to keep up with your multiple email accounts through one easy-to-set-up and easy-to-use interface. Every computer should have ePrompterT. And it is FREE!!!