Business Addresses, Hotmail addresses and phone numbers on the Internet
In the pre internet days, if you saw a PO Box number, you always were dubious about sending money to them; they were bound to be scam artists. However with the advent of the internet and so many businesses being run from home; a PO Box number is common occurrence, and a practical one at that.
Most of the time a post office box is used for security reasons. With so many people running a business from home it is not secure to list your home address, what you are selling and possibly quantity of stock kept in the home.
Would you like your home address on the internet, along with a photo of yourself...and photos all your possessions? Of course you wouldn’t.
I’m mobility disabled and work from home; I can’t go to an office even if I wanted to. The only stock I have at home is my computer, which is my lifeline to the world; I don’t have much money around the place but still don’t want my home address listed online.
Phone numbers are also one thing that many people don’t want online. Who wants to give more spammers personal information, making it easier for them to ring you all hours of the day and night asking you to buy this and that?
I have mentioned before that I have a client that lives in the outback of Australia, they mine sapphires.
Their phone line is dubious to say the least, the internet connection is about 14kb at the best of times, the slowest speed you can possibly get; ringing them while they are online tending to their website will do 1 of 3 things:
- It will either break their internet connection, while still sounding like the phone is engaged or being used.
- It will answer with a message that says this line is not in use, so it will sound to anyone ringing them that the phone number is a bogus one.
- Or it will just keep ringing.
Since these people live and work in their mine, many is the time they will hear the phone ringing, run back over the 100 or so feet to the house they live in, only to have someone hang-up.
The other problem they have is the middle of the night phone calls. People in other countries just don’t care that it maybe 3am in Australia; its 4pm where they live and that's a perfectly reasonable time to ring anyone!
Hotmail and other free email accounts
This is one of those sticky ones - many people won’t deal with anyone with a hotmail, yahoo or Gmail (etc) account. There are, however, valid reasons for using these free email accounts.
- Some people started out using them and after they had a website made; their host didn’t include any email addresses, or didn’t set any up, so unless a new website owner has some internet savvy, they may not know how to set up domain name email address.
- Some people are just so used to using them. Just having a website is enough of a learning curve, they don’t want to learn how to use a domain name email account as well.
- Spam. When that free email account is getting just too much spam coming in, they change to a new address, and send out emails to their friends to let them know the new address.
- Apparently with G-mail you can service several domain name email accounts, I don’t know how this works, so can’t comment on this.
Feel free to use this article on your website, blog or post; all copies of this article must be accompanied with the reference to the original author as follows:
Lynny Brown
Canz Design
www.canzdesign.com
