Alot of people use their home account as the address they list on all their various pages in order to correspond with visitors. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you have to share the account with someone, say a family member, you don't them snooping through your mail and deleting stuff by accident.

Now, free webproviders as well as many pay-providers, supply email accounts for their users such as Geocities and Tripod. You use programs to download the mail such as Eudora, Internet Mail, or Netscape. In any case these accounts are ok but there are disadvantages to them as well. With Geocities in particular, their are constant mail problems and late recieving and many hassles you don't want to deal with. You also autodownload attachments when you recieve your mail. Viruses can be hassle to try to get out of your inbox with service providers.

Gorene's Solution: Apply for a rocketmail, or my personal pick, Hotmail email account. Sure, the file allocation allowed in the mailbox is somewhat limited and the message amount may be as well, but if you have some extra account like the auto-geocities one, you can just forward stuff to that one and not have to worry. It also eliminates the terrible risk of viruses unless you are foolish enough to WILLING download Happy99.exe. In any case, if you do get a virus you can just have your virus scan delete it and then go on your mary way checking email!

If you want info on getting an account like this go to Hotmail and read their information. Its clear, simple, and to the point and you can set up a working account in a matter of minutes with no phone calls or great waits.

Remember that email is the webmaster's best friend in terms of continuing to make your site the best it can be if not one of the best on the web.