Most of us use free email services to create and maintain email accounts. We sometimes use these email accounts to send very important emails. I too have experienced this. But there are times when we hate these email services for many reasons. I will describe some disadvantages of these free email services in this post.
The most important disadvantage is security and privacy. We cannot control our privacy and security of our emails and profile data. All free email service providers, including Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, say they guarantee total privacy. But can we make sure that they actually do? Most of us receive unwanted emails (spam) even if we do not provide our email addresses to a third party. Some of you may know that many free email services sell your email addresses to various marketing companies. Therefore, we cannot believe the guarantees of these free email service providers.
Another downside is that most of these free email services provide simple web-based email services that we can’t do much modification to. For example, if we use the Gmail web interface to send an email, it is very difficult to add an image from our local machine instead of sending it as an attachment. It also limits the customization of text and images. It’s also difficult to add a custom email signature.
Many companies offer free email services to make it a good means of advertising and marketing. Actually, that’s all they want and they don’t care how it affects the email user. For example, when you sign in to your Gmail or Yahoo email account, you’ll see ads on the right side and at the top. This isn’t a huge headache on Gmail, but it’s a real headache on Yahoo, especially with their new webmail interface. I’m not comfortable with that and it’s actually a headache for me. I think most of you feel the same way. It is possible to assume that we will lose the actual size of our email workspace in the near future, where more and more advertising and marketing methods will be added to our web email interface. Until now, there is a way to stop this by setting up an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird for our email account.
As far as I know, some companies and individuals pay less attention to the emails they receive from free email service addresses as they experience most of them as spam. Because of this, there is a high chance that very important emails sent to them will be missed. This will also affect us if we send important emails from free email services.
Therefore, it is better if you can have a personal email account on your own domain (eg [email protected]) if it is affordable. Otherwise, be sure to use an email client and put a catchy subject line in the email where the recipient will pay more attention to your email.
