How to set up a free email account
When you place a classified ad with Harvard Magazine, we strongly suggest using an email address in addition to or instead of a phone number in your ad as your point of contact so that people can more easily reach you. The majority of people are responding to ads via email versus phone, and you are likely to find your response rate increase if you include your email address in your ad.
Many of our advertisers, however, don’t feel comfortable having an email address that includes their name or other identifying information as they wish to protect their identity from people they don’t know, or they want to use a separate email address from their personal one for responses. Services such as Gmail and Outlook.com are free of charge to anyone, and internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, etc. offer free email accounts to their customers.
If you are not familiar with how to set up an email account, it’s pretty simple and should not take you more than 5 minutes. We highly recommend Gmail as it is very intuitive, they still have the best spam filtering and protection around, they give you a lot of storage space—15 gigabytes (you will never need to delete anything), you can send multiple attachments in an email—up to 25 megabytes (great if you’re sending a bunch of photos), and you have a one stop shop for Google Calendar, Google Drive (for big files/photos you want to share with others), photo hosting, You Tube, blogging & many other things.
To create an email account with Gmail:
- Go to www.gmail.com
- In the upper right corner of the page you will see a box that says “Create an account”. Click on "create an account". If you already are using Gmail for your regular email, but want to create a separate Gmail email address for your ad, sign out of your account (you should see the option to sign out of your account in the upper right hand corner of the page) and you will be taken to a screen that allows you to sign into your current account or create a new account. Hit "create a new account".
- Gmail will take you through the steps on how to set up your email address. Choose a username that is generic and does not include any personal information such as your name, birthdate, address, city you live in, etc. When you are asked to provide your full name, you can make up a name, and you can do the same for the date of birth and gender. They will ask you for your regular email address as a back up in case you lose your password on your new account and need to reset it. It is OK to put that information in as that is not shared with other users.
- After you've set up your account, if you need some help using Gmail and learning the features it offers, click here for a comprehensive tutorial.
In addition to Gmail, here are some other services that offer free email accounts. A few include Outlook.com, Yahoo.com, AOL or contact your current internet service provider and sign up for an account.