Premium Email Providers and What They Offer
You've heard of some of the top Internet provider companies such as AOL and Road Runner. When you have an account with an Internet service provider, you also get an email account. The email lets you keep up to a certain amount of space for your email to reside. One of the very largest of the premium email providers is AOL with unlimited storage, virus and spam protection as well as spell checking.
A major shortcoming of the application-based email providers though, is that a user had to be at their originating computer in order to check their emails. Enter webmail, where a user can access their email inbox from any computer in the world that has access to the Internet. The first ISP-free premium email service was launched in 1996, and known at HoTMail. Still called Hotmail, it is owned by Windows and one of the most popular and premium email providers out there.
Along to follow were others, include Gmail. The downside here is that a user who wants to go back and view an email must be connected to the Internet, whereas with application-based email, old messages are accessible. Regardless of their benefits and shortcomings, here is a short run-down of the premium email providers:
Hotmail--Previously called MSN Hotmail, and now known as Windows Live Hotmail was launched in 1996, and was one of the first web-based email services. It was sold to Microsoft in 1997 for about $400 million. Users get 5 GB of storage, which unfolds as needed. Highly popular, this premium email provider has an estimated 270 million users in 36 languages all over the world.
Hotmail uses Ajax programing and supports other browsers such as Firefox's Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Safari. And like all premium email providers, it offers virus scanning and spam filters.
Gmail--Google's free email service launched in 2004 and gave users free storage of 1GB per user. This was a massive advantage for an email provider in comparison to what premium email providers offered at the time, which was 2 MB and 4 MB maximum storage loads. Gmail is simple, free and shows you how much storage you still have available.
Gmail uses a systems that automatically scans email content and then places ads triggered from the scan onto the right side of the screen. This has caused some complaint as concerns about privacy have arisen, but it is still a popular type of free email. Other types of free email that top the list of favorites are listed below.
Yahoo! Mail--Created in 1996 by two Stanford graduate students, Yahoo was a web search directory, just as Google is now. Yahoo! underwent several merger and takeover attempts from Microsoft, but never allowed a merger or purchase. After it offered email service, it would become the largest email provider in the world, with Gmail being one of its main competitors. Yahoo's email has limitless storage, however, which puts it at an advantage over many others.
Other Free Email Providers
GMX Mail is ranked one of the top free email sites by users. Said to be reliable, this email service has a storage space of 5GB, a top-notch interface and good spam and virus filter. Another premium email site is Lavabit, which is more privacy conscious than some of the other email providers. Lavabit is secure and solidly set up. Straightforward in its name, Inbox.com also offers 5GB of storage, it is fast and sophisticated, and has a speedy search feature. Other free premium mail providers that users rate highly include FastMail, Zenbe, Gawab, FreePOP and HotPOP.
