I’m sure when you were a kid your mother told you that we are judged by the company we keep. Funny that when we get older we seemed to forget that because we could sure take advantage of that advice in business. Many people don’t seem to realize that appearances are everything and even on the internet there is a matter of appearance. Who hasn’t heard the phrase “put your best foot forward”. So what is one of the first things people know about you in business? Your email address. Right? Well, smart business people have learned to judge people or use something we call email profiling to avoid people they judge not to be that smart in business based solely on that one thing … the email address.
If I ever come across anyone who uses an email address that ends in @aol.com or back in the day @juno.com. My first thought is to avoid them like the plague. If they don’t know enough to get a real email account then they probably aren’t worth my time so I wouldn’t do business with them.
In time we learned the same about @Yahoo and @Hotmail or nowadays @live as well.
There is nothing wrong with having these kind of email services for personal reasons but for business? It’s very unprofessional. It shows someone like me that issues of reliability and security aren’t a priority for you. Or that you can’t be bothered to spend like $5 a month to get a real @YourName.com email address.
So in short that is what email profiling is. If you are using a free email account for business, chances are you are being judged by that and not in a favorable way.