I never use the one that comes with my internet. I have a several free email accounts. My “main” email account is one of my Gmail accounts. It is myrealname@gmail. I have moved and / or changed ISPs often over the years. The free accounts don’t change.
Flickr won’t allow you to change the email account associated with your profile? That seems odd.
My primary account is outlook.com. I have slowly been moving away from gmail.com which I’ve had for years. I have one with my isp, cox.net and it (and they) suck.
Aside from my email at my job, I’ve only ever had one personal email account. Back in the 90s, AOL was my internet service provider. I no longer pay for internet access through AOL, but I still have that same email address.
I voted that my primary account is free but I have other paid accounts.
The place where most of my email goes is my gmail account. That is not, however, the email address I typically use. Instead, I get an address through a professional organization that forwards to gmail. That is technically paid email, since I must pay annual dues to keep the address. If Google ever crosses the “creeps me out too much” threshold, I can just change the address to which the main address points to one of my other accounts. Those other accounts are all through the domains I own, plus the paid service that hosts them.
I have a GMail account since you basically can’t use Google tools and apps without one. I might or might not have it were it not for that limitation. I don’t use it for much - sometimes for backup sending or file transfer when it’s to another GMail account.
I have a Comcast account I use as a master for my highest-level registrations, domains etc. - since it’s not on a private or leased server that might be the source of a problem I need to know about and manage.
Everything else - I have a dozen business and personal domains and have had my email under one or another for at least 15 years. I like having total control over the username, features, etc.
Since I had AOL back in the days of 2400 baud download speeds, back before Netscape released its browser and created the Web as we know it, email was what I was paying for.
You could do other things online at that speed if you were really patient, but there wasn’t that much else to do yet besides email.
I have three Hotmail accounts, a 17 year old high school one with a goofy name, a more formal one for family and resumes and one that I created specifically for wedding spam that is now a catch all account.
I have a gmail account for my phone contacts but I never use the actual email.
I have a work account.
Oops, in that case I answered the poll incorrectly: I said that I’ve never had an email account I had to pay for, but I do have a web site with a couple of email addresses. They don’t cost any extra, but I am paying for the domain and web hosting.
My personal email accounts have always been free: currently Gmail, previously Yahoo, and originally Rocketmail (which was acquired by Yahoo).
I’ve also had a variety of corporate email accounts since 1998.
Let’s see…
Two legacy paid-ISP accounts one of which is still my private and personal-business workhorse.
One gmail account for the sake of Android mobile devices and signing in for some youtube content.
One free service account with a “serious” username for those cases where I may not want to give out my main personal e-mail but may still want to provide access to a third party.
One free service account as my “secret identity” for things I so not wish to be easily linked to my regular e-mail.
I have accounts at Yahoo!, Hotmail, GMail, and probably a few others, but I check those maybe once a month. My primary accounts are both paid accounts tied to my domain name, and have been for about ten years now. I guess I have an ISP account, too, but I don’t use that. So, I voted the first.
Yes, when you’re running a business, even as a freelancer/sole proprietor, it looks a bit cheap and amateurish, in my opinion, to have a free email address. (The perception of this will depend on the industry. Some industries simply don’t care at all.) Besides, it’s included in my web hosting price.
I currently run my own email server for several domains, use google apps for business for several domains, and have gmail and yahoo accounts. My primary accounts are the ones I own the domains for, as those are the only thing you really own. If gmail (or more likely, yahoo), shut down tomorrow, I wouldn’t have any real problems. That has happened to me before - netaddress went pay back in the day and I lost my email address.
I have 5 email accounts that come with my provider. I use one of them as my main account. I also own a domain which has emails but I don’t use it at all. But if I want to check email anywhere other than home, I use gmail and a real computer, not my cell. I also have a couple of other emails for various reasons. I rarely check them.
I’m always surprised when people text me 5 times, then hit my facebook PMs, urgently, call my cell over and over, but never call my real phone. I have the ringer turned off but I can hear when the voice mail turns on. LEAVE A MESSAGE.
But in all other cases, I do not have my cell phone attached to my hip, and it is definitely not attached to anything on facebook or any of my emails. My brother thinks it’s funny when I reply to a text he sent me 3 days ago.
Nope, unless you count my college e-mail account as “paid”, since I was paying for school. That’s the closest thing I can think of. Other than that, I’ve always used web-based mail. (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) I use gmail nowadays.
I do have a gmail account, which I rarely use and I guess one from my ISP that I have never used, but my main account is with my employer (although I am retired). That has been my email provider for 30 years. Those were the days–no spam in 1984.
I use yahoo for sites accessed by the public that require an email address.
My main email address, as closely guarded as I can make it, is provided by the ISP.
Rarely do I get anything but spam through yahoo. Very, very rarely do I get spam at the ISP address. The last time it happened was a couple of years ago, thanks to a friend’s computer that was hijacked by a virus or trojan.
My SO and I registered a domain name about 18 years ago, just to have our own email addresses. At the time, we were changing ISPs often enough to make it a hassle to keep our friends updated, and we saw the writing on the wall that said “You want an address you can keep forever!” In additions, I don’t really trust the big guys (gmail/hotmail/etc.) to not sample, sell off or spam to an account with them. So addresses on our own domain are used for friends, family and business. Free services are used for secondary accounts.
My first-ever email account was a work account. After getting laid off from there, I signed up for a free Yahoo! account. My basic account is now with Gmail.
I’ve never paid for an account. All my personal correspondence goes to my Gmail account. I do not use my work account for personal uses. I sometimes use my Gmail account for work purposes such as professional subscriptions, which are auto-forwarded tomy work email. I figure that if the company goes under or if they lay me off (but I’ve been there since 1995), I’ll have more control that way.