freelancers and consultants

[hatwoman]

what kind of email address do you use? do you think it's important to have something that sounds professional? what does sound professional?

I think you can use anything you like - hotmail, hushmail. aol etc. I do know that some big companies have problems receiving from blue yonder for some reason.

If you buy a website you often get your own access to mail so you can be [email protected] or [email protected] or whatever.

To be professional I think your name (i.e. how you introduce yourself on the phone) at the domain.

Think about how many times you may have to give it out on the phone so try and make it easy to spell if you can (though obviously your name will affect this)

Sorry if this is obvious.

I am a freelance consultant and have bought a domain name in myname.co.uk - I think a "personal" email address looks a bit unprofessional and it only costs a few quid for a domain name. Also I like a separation of work from home emails. It also gives me the option to set up a website with the same URL, which I'm in the process of doing. I just bought mine through my normal ISP because they are reliable and I also bought web hosting but there's loads of companies that do it. I notice that there is more of a trend now for consultants to have a company name even if they are sole traders. I haven't gone down that route yet - it seemed to increase in the field that I work two or three years after I started working freelance, but I sort of wish I had. HTH

Depends what you're using it for - your own domain name sounds better than hotmail etc, but it depends who's seeing it. My DH is an IT freelancer and only uses his email to send CVs to agents so uses his personal email address, but if he was marketing himself directly to clients he'd use his Ltd co domain name. (If some bugger wasn't cybersquatting it...)

Agree, a personal / company domain name is better than hotmail or Yahoo. Also quite a lot of spam filters will filter out these (Hotmail).

I use my ordinary one. Probably I should have another one, but I think it's probably more important to sort out separate bank accounts and phone lines, frankly.

A friend of mine calls his company Surname Consulting, and his email is [email protected]. He has an unusual name - you might find that smith.org has gone already.

mi - how are you? Our mumsnet threads do not often cross!

You can very cheaply get a domain from people like 1&1
Hotmail is junk, do not use it for your business.
Currently the worst is AOL who is trying to get everyone to pay for the right to send email to it's users by randomly labelling them as spam.

One tip regardless of your mail provider is to make it forward all emails to a Gmail account.

This means you have a backup, and can access it over the web.

Backups of all types a a BIG IMPORTANT thing.
Many business both big and small have suffered horribly or died because of a lack of backups.