High productivity is important in every business, but lends a particularly unique challenge in the onset of your home office set up. Many people make the transition to working from a home office for job security, to lower commuting costs, and to spend more time with their families. While these are great motivations, all the best reasons in the world will be thwarted without planning to effectively communicate with clients and co-workers to keep productivity high. Getting your home office set up with email is an effective way to do this.
You may be thinking "Web-based or PC based email?"
"Which is better?" "Does it even matter?" Yes, it does matter and read on for the top 10 reasons web-based email is a better way to communicate than PC based email.
Reason 1. It's almost always free. When working from your home office, it's necessary to consider the costs of maintaining your equipment and the purchase of the supplies. Most home office budgets are significantly smaller than that of the large or even small business of your later days. You don't have to download or purchase costly software to set up or access your web-based email.
Reason 2. You can access it from anywhere. If you have an internet connection, you can read and send emails. You may be in a meeting with a client or even with your family on an outing and you're waiting for that important emailed response from a client or co-worker; you can respond to the email immediately.
Reason 3. More reliable. Having thousands and sometimes millions of users requires web-based email companies to work harder at reliability; this has been my experience.
Reason 4. Your assistant can check or send email to your clients if you are in a meeting or just plain unavailable just as easily as you could from wherever they are located.
Reason 5. Emails always received quickly. You don't have to be logged into your PC for your email messages to show up in your in-box. They are delivered as soon as the sender hits "send". If you have a dial up internet connection, you don't have to wait a long time for your messages to be downloaded into your in-box as with PC based email. Once you're on-line, you have immediate access to all emails sent to you.
Reason 6. Storage space. You can store a large number of email messages, for future reference, without taking up valuable memory on your PC. Most web-based email services allow you to access 2-3 megabytes of storage space on their email server.
Reason 7. You can download and attach larger files to your web-based emails than with PC based email. Many PC based emails will not allow sending and receiving attachments as small as 1 megabyte while many web-based emails will enable you to send and receive up to 10 megabyte attachments.
Reason 8. Free customizable calendars/planners. Many offer free customizable and shareable calendars as well as other helpful business tools to make work-flow more efficient and increase your productivity.
Reason 9. Virus scanner. Most web-based emails will automatically scan the emails and attachments you send and receive.
Reason 10. There are tons of options and the companies are easy to find. You can create an email account at http://www.yahoo.com, http://www.gmail.com, http://www.hotmail.com, http://www.live.com, http://www.mail.com, http://www.mail2web.com, http://www.aol.com, http://www.aim.com, http://www.mailinator
.com, http://www.netaddress.com, http://www.lycos.com, http://www.10minutemail.com and many more. You can find more for yourself here http://dir.yahoo.com/business_and_economy/business_to_business/communications_and_networking/internet_and_world_wide_web/email_providers/free_email/
Happy emailing...