Why do academic/business people in certain countries use personal email addresses for work purposes?

The people I know in Ethiopia (mostly academics) use the online services because they're so much more reliable. When the power supply is flaky, the network infrastructure is also flaky, and having your mail hosted elsewhere is a good call. The Ethiopian govt. engages in censorship, but at the domain name level (so, for example, you can't get blogspot sites in Ethiopia). I am not sure whether this also impacts upon email.

I see this too. The idea is that it will be easier, more dependable, more web-accessible, and more credible. I would raise an eyebrow at the "more credible" aspect, except that I also see American coworkers who are confused by foreign e-mail suffixes. It is apparently not terribly uncommon to be unaware that it is possible to have an e-mail address that does not end in .com, .net, or .edu. I've even seen foreign addresses erroneously "corrected" to include such a suffix.

As far as China goes, not too many people have a work or school email address. I don't think universities supply email addresses to students, and most Chinese companies do not supply email addresses to employees. As for the silly names on email addresses, I think people have less of a sense of what is considered unprofessional in English.

nthing the comments about reliability and accessibility. Nearly all of my contacts, especially academic contacts, throughout the Middle East, Africa and Latin America send me emails from their personal account, with a copy to their work address. About 80% of the addresses I see are Yahoo mail. A lot gets trapped as spam by my employer's mail server, which is really irritating - there are ways to whitelist but I'd basically just be whitelisting everything!

Because it costs time, money and expertise to maintain official email addresses. If you are company XYZ and have 100 employees, its much simpler to have them all create [email protected] addresses on gmail as opposed to spending time and effort buying a server, bandwidth, mail server, etc.

Nthing that these services are more reliable and private. Don't assume that organization/university give email addresses out anyway.

reitering [and it sounds like this is also common in other lesser developed countries], academic departments are so low on funds that many things we [the west or America] take for granted: an email account [and the costs of servers for this email, etc], computers in the office, a room to fit a desk and computer in, and even office supplies, are not provided or if so, not very reliably. One of my professors [who was pretty distinguished, guest lectured in Europe and the US, chaired the dept, etc.] had his primary office at a local NGO, because the department's office was so cramped and the electricity wasn't very reliable there. His email address was with a local ISP. Other academics and businesses that I met there also used the Yahoo/hotmail/gmail for the reliability and free price. Not sure about this last point, but domain registration fees in other countries could be prohibitively expensive, relative to their other business costs.

Another thing to consider is that in countries with low internet penetration, academic and techy people are more likely to have been early adopters, and have used a stable webmail address for years. Since e-mail culture isn't so well developed, and private addresses are not frowned upon, it may be more convenient to keep using the same address even when [email protected] becomes available.

Gah. This drives me nuts, too. Not 30 minutes ago I had to shoot out an email to one of our overseas offices where one employee was doing this. Worse, in our employee directory, there are still several people that use hotmail/yahoo/gmail, etc.... and somehow that's okay with the head office. While it's one thing if you're in third-world country X and your business/school doesn't have the resources to provide one or it's too expensive/unreliable to have your own domain, my company has offices worldwide and most of our overseas employees use company addresses. It's these few stubborn holdouts that make no sense and bring down the image of my company.