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Summary: Free email services and accounts are convenient and ubiquitous. But free email services aren't the right place to keep your important information.
I've been receiving a lot of reports of problems with Microsoft's Hotmail free email service lately, and it really begs the question: are free email services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail worth the cost? My position: Yes. And: Absolutely Not. As always, it depends on your needs and your expectations. • You may be asking yourself, "What cost? Free email services are free, aren't they?" By now you should know there's no such thing as "free" - everything has a cost. It may not come out of your wallet each month, but there's definitely a cost. Here are some of the costs I associate with free email services:
In short, I would never recommend a free email service for anything that you consider important, or anything that you want to keep long term. Here's how to judge: if the email account went away completely tomorrow, along with all the mail and contact information it contains, would it be an inconvenience or a catastrophe? If the later, then you need to get away from your free account. Now. If your email is actually important to you, then spend a little each month to get a "real" email account from a regular ISP or mail service. Depending on the provider, each one of the 'costs' I list above will at least be diminished, if not eliminated. But I did say that free email services were also worth it, didn't I? In fact, I have a Hotmail account, and a Yahoo account, and a GMail account. Why? Free accounts are perfect when you don't really care what happens to them. They're great when you need to supply an email address to a company that you think may spam you later. Or if you need or want to remain anonymous or otherwise separate that email from your important stuff. Or for leaving as a contact address on a website that will probably get harvested for spam someday. In other words, free email accounts are perfect throw away accounts. If you get something important that you want to save on one of those accounts, just forward it to your real email account, and you're safer. But, for heaven's sake, don't use a free service for your primary and important email. You're just asking for trouble. PS: as a side note, the problems I'm hearing about today all involve HotMail. My opinion stands for other free services like Yahoo mail - I get tons of spam on my Yahoo account. Today they seem more reliable, but I expect they'll have their own set of technical issues from time to time. Google's GMail service is not yet released - it's in beta - so it remains to be seen exactly how reliable or problematic it turns out to be. As you can imagine, I'm somewhat skeptical, and expect that it will fall into the same traps as Yahoo and Hotmail. Related:
• Recent Comments
Leo is right....web-based e-mails are great"THROW-AWAY" programs. Does anyone ever want their precious ISP URL known by anybody except their friends and family? Can you imagine some of those replica watch or viagra websites getting to know your ISP address? I like Yahoo because it has a nice spam device and other features that keep it simple and effective, especially the "Answers FORUM". Posted by: Ron at November 16, 2007 11:21 AMI use Outlook (the full blown program) and have a cable broadband ISP main account I want to protect. Can I add any one of the free email service accounts just to get one of those 'throw-away' email addresses, AND still use my full blown Outlook program to access both, or several email accounts, simultaneously? I have been using Craigslist and other services to buy and sell household items and want to protect my identity when I respond to inquiries w/o having to sign-in to each individual email service to see if I have mail. Posted by: Wally at December 9, 2007 09:35 AM-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- GMail accounts, for example, can be configured to be downloaded into Outlook. Leo
iD8DBQFHXaP4CMEe9B/8oqERAhY4AJ4qVKWx1alG+36/Wcu2OtTJHC0puwCfX9p2 My email got hacked and i dont know the password! I have been using Google's Gmail for quite some time now, in addition to my ISP's E-mail service, and have so far been very pleased. I do see alot more spam in Gmail, but it has been blocked 100%. The amount of storage is just unbelievable, although I am a little leary about security, but I have not been let down by any 'free' Google service yet! I for the most part agree that "nothing's really free", but I honestly think there are exceptions such as AVG Free Anti-virus, A-squared Free, Ccleaner, Comodo Firewall, etc. Of course you must be very careful, but I've found these programs far better than the services I'd been paying for (I prefer not to mention their names in all fairness, but they are some of the better rated}. Posted by: Dave Markley at January 26, 2008 07:51 PM when my laptop boot i get this message c:window\system32\ne0ks.exe. how do i remove this error from my laptop . i am using windows home edition I hope this article was written in 2005. I have used free google apps to provide email to a very large company. I havent experienced any problems servicing my many users. As far as spam, please learn about SPF and open relay servers. I cant justify the cost of Microsoft exchange for the very extra value my users experience. This perceived value will only dissapear as google and yahoo make Office and Exchange obsolete in the next 5 years. Posted by: Matt at February 11, 2008 10:34 PMI had never really made a decision about having a reliable email. When Yahoo made the Space available to store lots of contact information, I went for it. I thought now I can throw away every hard copy and access my contact information from anywhere in the world. Then one day all of my contacts with email and snail mail addresses and phone numbers and private information disappeared suddenly from Yahoo. Even the categories became blank. Boy, how I wished I had thought about a more reliable email service then and done something about it sooner. Posted by: OLIVIA HILL at April 5, 2008 11:25 PMI am using hotmail because my service provider account had NO spam filter, and contrary to other reports, got more spam on that account than on yahoo or hotmail, which provided methods for handling junk.I would like to use my nac.net account since we pay for it but it is too difficult. How can I find a dial-up server in my area code? Posted by: Aileen at April 26, 2008 11:21 AMEven if you keep your email for your friends only, there is still risk of the replicas and viagra sellers to get your email, don't be fooled by false security given by paid account, anyone who you give your email, however trustable he/she is may leak your email even without their knowledge. Their computer may be infected with an email harvesting spyware (especially for those who use Outlook or any other mail program). Once your email is registered to a spammer, it stays, and spammer have the tendency to share email list. Posted by: Lie at June 19, 2008 07:20 AMPost a comment on "Are free email services worth it?":
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