As opposed to the real world, there is an added danger to doing business on the Internet.

In the real world, people can lie. They can cheat. They can defraud. Yet in the real world, when you do business with someone, chances are you will eventually meet them in person. You will know where that someone is located. You might even find out your someone's reputation with a simple call to a local Better Business Bureau. In the real world, it's harder to hide a real business or a real person.

"All this unfamiliarity, all this anonymity, leads to an inherent distrust. This environment of obscurity encourages our overactive skepticism of each other. "

On the net, the lines of reality are blurred. One can almost never know for sure, with whom they are dealing. That dude who runs the sponsor program might run his site off US servers but live in Russia. The company that handles your shopping cart might have English text on their site and a Western sensibility but the fact is that they are really located on a small island just off the US shore.

The same goes with any other webmaster or adult company on the web. They don't know you and you don't know them. The odds say it's likely you'll never meet face to face. All this unfamiliarity, all this anonymity, leads to an inherent distrust. This environment of obscurity encourages our overactive skepticism of each other.

When you are downloading and browsing your email, how often will you hit the delete button simply because a sender has an email address emanating from AOL or HotMail? How many times have you read

this rule from a sponsor or TGP?

"We will not accept submissions from webmasters with free email addresses like Juno or Yahoo."

There's a reason for that rule. Although both Juno and Yahoo offer paid email account services as well as Internet access, both companies' still give away free email accounts. Free accounts to anybody, anywhere. One can have several email accounts and resultantly, one could adopt several different identities through these free email addresses.

The average adult sponsor or TGP gallery reviewer is a very busy person. These folks receive hundreds of emails a day. It can take hours to sift through one morning's email correspondence. There is little time for blind trust or blind acceptance. One way to save time is by blocking emails from free providers.

That sounds harsh but this is a harsh business. It doesn't matter if your use your full first name on your @yahoo.com account. It won't make much difference that you're an honest person. What matters is what your email address says about you. To many, an @hotmail.com email address relays a message of unprofessional obfuscation.

With a free email address, you're telling the world that you aren't serious enough to shell out the $20.00 it takes to set up a real email address on a paid host. You're telling the world that you don't know who you are.

Granted, there are many reasons to get a free email account or two. With one, you can access Yahoo or Juno from anywhere. Free email accounts are great for keeping the phishers and spammers away from your personal ISP. Nevertheless, when it comes to your identity as a businessperson, why risk looking like an amateur? Why risk losing business?

In addition, there's the matter of consistency when it comes to your email address. How can you create a dependable identity if you have six different email addresses? How will you build partnerships? How will you sustain your brand without a reliable email contact? Why should anyone trust you when they find out you've emailed from three different accounts?

You know you're a truthful person, but your new content provider doesn't know you from Adam. You know you make clean galleries and that you don't cheat but the TGP reviewer can't make such a claim. You know you live in a country the sponsor accepts but how will your sponsor know when you apply via an @gmail.com address?

Here is some Cozy advice from the Titmowse:

Register a domain and buy a hosting package. Use the email address from your domain as your master email address. Your domain name is your identity. The email address from your domain is your identifier. Get one and make it the one to rule them all!