Free Email Accounts for Site Safety

I learned early on not to use an email account associated with a domain name in certain places because when a problem occurs, it can be almost impossible to do what you need to do.

In this case our domain registration email was associated with that domain's email. For example when we bought the domain we listed xxx@mydomain.com as the contact email.

Then our webhost started experiencing massive server problems right before they went out of business. Email and sites were inaccessible and it was a big problem all the way around.

Not an issue, right? Just get another webhost and change the DNS settings with the domain registrar, right?

Not so fast. For one thing (and this was our fault) we had forgotten the password used to register the domain. But we couldn't get email at the address on file so there was no easy way to change the password. This caused big delays in getting the site moved.

There are other cases where it's not good to tie an email address to a domain. For example billing for your web host goes to your website email which may be cut off if you don't pay your bill so you never get the email or can't log in if their log in system uses an email address as a login name.

Or your autoresponder sequence gets your site shut down for spam but all correspondence from the autoresponder company and the webhost goes to the shut down email. Etc. Etc.

So for domain registration, autoresponders, and web hosting registration, I've always used an outside email address such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail.

If you were going to choose the most "secure", "safest" free email account, which would you choose? Note this is for billing and administrative purposes only - not customer contact or sending newsletters. Also note that sending to another domain hosted on the same webhost wouldn't really solve the problem if the webhost was having server problems or whatever.

Thanks.

Mark