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Free Email

Ideally, it's best to have a proper, domain-related email address - but that requires professional hosting. You could, of course, use your ISP-related email. The big problem there is that you're then kinda stuck with your ISP - and I don't know about you, but I'm always willing to consider changing ISP depending on the packages being offered, so I never use ISP-related email addresses.

Luckily, getting a free email address is really simple now. There are heaps of free web-based email services such as hotmail, fortunecity, yahoo, bravenet etc, but my preferred one is Gmail by Google - although you'll need to be 'invited' by a current member at this stage - it's not open to the general public.

Web-based email has some other advantages over server-based email. You can read it from anywhere that you can get on the net, and you get a chance to look at the email & its attachments in an Inbox before deciding whether or not to download it. If it's Spam, or looks a bit suspicious in some way, you can delete it without it getting within coo-ee of your hard-drive. No waiting for ten minutes to download your email & then realising someone ELSE has sent you that cursed virus-ridden frog-in-a-blender. Ditch it straight from your email server without opening it. (Incidentally, I advise NEVER opening attachments in formats such as .exe that can contain viruses - see my katsclass.com site for advice about virus protection).

Now you have an email address for your site, you need webspace to put your site in.