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July-September 2006

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Offer Email Accounts to Your Members
by Ash Nallawalla,
APCUG Director

Does your user group have its own domain name, such as myusergroup.org? (If not, can it afford to buy one for less than $10 per year?) Thanks to Microsoft, your user group can improve your membership retention rate! It is completely free.

How? Using Windows Live Custom Domains (http://domains.live.com/), you can offer email accounts on Windows Live Hotmail. Yes, your members can obtain their personal email addresses at your user group domain, e.g. ash@myusergroup.org but the emails are stored in Hotmail. This means no hosting or server maintenance hassles for your volunteers! In addition to email, your members can also access other Live/MSN services such as Live Messenger and Live Spaces.

Using your user group’s domain name for member email addresses will help retention because people don’t like to change their email address once it is widely used. They will like the convenience of being able to check their email from any web browser. Discuss this at your next Board meeting and let us know if you decide to use it.