Can or should I use hosted email with a web hosting account?

See the previous answer, but yes you can, and in some cases should. The email provided with our web hosting accounts will work fine for most cases. Email is a complicated technology. With the amount of spammers out there now, it becomes more and more difficult to have your mail delivered reliably. Sent mail is always considered "best effort", as it's completely out of your hands once your mail server makes the call to the receiving end. There are many factors that could cause it to be rejected, get marked as spam, or greylisted. Our dedicated mail hosting plans help mitigate these potential problems through the use of very extensive filtering, and maintaining clean IP Reputation across a very large pool of IP addresses used as mail relays. The shared web hosting services do not have this capability (though they may some day).