There are a few different types of email account, depending on what you want to do. Once you’ve signed up for your own email address, you can switch ISP as many times as you like, keeping the same email address. Next, if you were using the free email that comes with your ISP, you can’t change provider without losing your account. That’s a better use experience overall and makes sending and receiving email a lot less invasive. Once you pay for your email, you’ll not longer get swamped with adverts as you do with Google and Microsoft accounts. It means no more endlessly typing in usernames only to find that they’ve already been taken, as you do with the free services. The big benefit, as we said, is that you get your own custom email address based on the domain that you register, such as In addition, you can add other email addresses as you need them, with yours to use.

Here, we’ll show you what the various options are, how you go about setting them up and what the benefits are over a free service.

If you’re running a business, it also looks a lot more professional to have a dedicated email address than it does to be using a free one. This gets you a completely custom email address and lets you expand to add more users or family members, as you want.

A better way is to register your own domain name and then add an email package to it. While you get a lot with a free email account, such as those from Gmail or Microsoft, you’re plagued with adverts and you get less choice over your email name.

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