How to Register for an Email Address in South Africa

You may think getting an email address is a simple and easy task to do, yet there are many scholars and even adults who struggle. Technology has taken over and you are either with the times or you’re left behind. At some stage, you’ll come to a point where you’ll need an email address. And you’ll need it for (almost) everything on the Internet. Either because you’ll want to be part of the social media fever, buy things online, need it for work purposes or purely to keep in contact with people across the world. Whatever it may be, here’s what you’ll need to consider when you do decide to get an email address.

1. Choose an Email Provider

Ultimately this is the first thing you’ll need to figure out. Which email provider do I want to be associated with? Which one can give me the best benefits? You ideally want an email provider that has a lot of storage space for emails and easy features to navigate. The whole point of creating an email address is for you to be reachable and, vice versa, for you to reach people.

Here are some email providers to consider:

Of course, these are not the only email providers you can create accounts with, but they are among the better ones.

2. Time to Sign Up

Once you’ve decided on your email provider, it’s time to sign up. What’s particularly great is that most email providers allow you to create accounts for free. Yes, you heard right, it’s FREE. You’ll find a signup link on the website you want to join. Once clicked, you’ll be redirected to a page where you can create an account and provide minimal personal information such as your:

Full Name
Last Name
User Name (we’ll cover tips on this in the next point – this is an important one)
Birth Place
Gender
Contact number

FYI: Don’t worry, you are not clicking your life away. These details are merely for the system to capture your details and for other people to find you. Any personal information you don’t want to be displayed you can generally hide.

3. Your Username is Important

While you are filling out your details you need to come up with a username that will represent your email address. Will you use your account for personal or professional purposes? If you are looking to use it for professional purposes, here’s what I suggest. We all know how fun it is to be creative and think out of the box (everyone wants to stand out), yet I suggest you stick to the basics. What I mean here, simply phrased and to the point, just use your name. Remember, this email address will stick around for a long time and you want it to be and look professional. In five years time you’ll be grateful you followed this piece of advice.

Naturally, if you have a long name, surname or an interesting nickname, it might be difficult to keep your username short and sweet. The best advice I can give you is to try to keep it simple. Long and complicated email addresses with numbers and hashtags tend to look unprofessional.

Things to avoid:

Using too many numbers
Inappropriate nicknames (just to note, this won’t go down well with your future job employer)

If ever you send through a job application and the first thing your future employer sees is katie923iscool@gmail.com, it can go two ways. Either your future employer is going to chuck your email in the trash or perhaps, in some obscure way, they might think it’s quite funny. Nonetheless, you should keep in mind that it is always better to have a professional email address.

FYI: If you are really desperate and you just must have a funky email address, you can always create two email addresses – one for professional emails and one for your personal emails.

4. Create a Password

Your password is the key to secure any information in your email account. Make sure the password you choose is one that you’ll remember, one that isn’t too difficult and one that isn’t too easy for someone to steal. It’s always better to safe than sorry these days. Include at least 8 characters, lower case and upper case lettering as well as numbers in your password. This increases your password strength and decreases the chance of someone stealing your password.

FYI: A future reminder, change your password from time to time to increase the security of your account.

5. You’re ready to go

Now that you’ve filled in all of your details, the next step is to click the ‘sign up button and congratulations – you’ve got yourself an account. You are one step closer to exploring the Internet on a whole new level.

One extra tip for you and your new account, don’t sign up for everything at once. Only sign up for accounts you know you’ll be interested in. You don’t want your mailbox to be riddled with junk emails and spam.

On another note, if you are looking for advice on how to set up your CV, have a look here.

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