Free email
Summary Description No such thing as a free
lunch? Newswire's 5 Minute Guides examines free email services.
Author
Publication
Roullas Top10 Simon Vandore
Newswire
No
Editorial InformationArticle Location
Article Topic 5 Minute Guides
Story Order
Story Group 001008
Post Date 03/10/2000 06:27 AM Status Posted Entered by Simon
Vandore on 02/10/2000 09:20 AM
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Content
Introduction
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Why are there so many free email sites on the Web?
In late 1995 several companies developed sophisticated interfaces
between email and HTML, making it possible to send and retrieve
messages via Web pages rather than installing a POP (post office
protocol) email program on your own computer. One of the first
was a US Internet service provider (ISP) called USA.Net, which
offered standard POP mailboxes with a Web interface for about
$US20 per year via its Net@ddress service. Shortly afterwards, a
company called Hotmail began offering free (advertiser-supported)
Web email accounts which proved much more popular. Competitors
were quick off the mark and even Net@ddress abandoned its pricing
scheme and joined the "freemail" fray.
Why on earth would you offer a service for free?
The attraction for these companies lay in hit counts and the
ability to charge advertisers a high CPM (cost per thousand page
impressions). If you have to come to a Web site to check your
email, then you are a captive audience for online advertising.
Hotmail was soon able to boast millions of users and was bought
out by Microsoft. It is still one of the most visited sites on
the Web and helps to boost the hit count of affiliated sites such
as ninemsn.
What's the attraction of freemail for users?
Web-based freemail services are not as flexible as standard POP
email, but they offer many advantages. In the early days of
public Internet access, changing your ISP (or your job, if your
email was provided through work) usually meant changing your
email address and informing all your friends and customers.
Hotmail and its competitors offered a single, constant point of
contact -- users were free to switch to whichever ISP offered the
cheapest Internet access.
Free Web-based email also makes it easier to be anonymous, or to
provide different addresses for different purposes, as you can
register as many times as you like. For example, you might be a
high-powered executive called Jake Brown with a work address
jbrown@bigcompany.com, but you probably wouldn't want to mix this
with your online gaming name "JakeThePeg", so you make
jakethepeg@hotmail.com to keep your identities separate.
Web-based email is also ideal for those who share a computer or
use public access terminals. Even people who don't own computers
can use it.
What kinds of freemail services exist today?
Most portals and other popular Web sites are now expected to
offer free email as a standard feature to retain users. The most
popular is still Hotmail, but other international offerings
include iname.com (which holds the Email.com and Mail.com
domains, among many others), Excite Mail, Yahoo Mail (which
swallowed up long-standing provider Rocketmail), and Lycos
Communications. Two of the most popular Australian-based freemail
services are Start.com.au and Freemail.com.au, but the big
overseas names also have local presences. You can find a
comprehensive list at http://www.emailaddresses.com.
To distinguish themselves from competitors and make more money,
some freemail sites have begun offering value-added services. For
example, Net@ddress charges extra per year for spam filtering,
POP access, redirection to another email address, and so on.
Start.com.au offers an online diary and organiser.
What are the downsides of freemail?
Spam, spam and more spam (unsolicited advertising email)!
Sometimes spammers just pick a freemail site and automatically
send random combinations of letters such as qwerty@hotmail.com
until they find a real address. For example, Freemail.com.au was
hit by 60 million such messages in 48 hours during May, causing
major slowdowns for users.
Unscrupulous freemail providers may even engage in selling lists
of their users' email addresses to spammers. Other freemail
providers make money by attaching their own advertising to your
email. The flipside is that most freemail sites have taken
measures to prevent spammers using their servers to send mass
emails, but in retaliation spammers often fake their email
addresses as being from a freemail service. Some people like to
block all incoming email if it is from a freemail service,
because they have such a bad reputation for abuse.
Privacy is also a concern, as most signup processes for free
email accounts involve giving away personal information. In these
cases you want to be very sure that your freemail provider will
not be passing the details on to third parties, because personal
information is a very valuable commodity for marketers and direct
mailers. And a "free, permanent address" is only
permanent for as long as the freemail provider stays in business.
In some cases, terms and conditions have been changed after the
freemail company is sold, and in other cases customer information
is sold off as an asset when the venture is wound up.
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Bulletin Summary5 Minute Guides: Free email
No such thing as a free lunch? Newswire's 5 Minute Guides
examines free email services.
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5 Minute Guides: Free email
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