Overview of six of the best free e-mail providers

When it was launched in 2004, the e-mail service from Google shook up the whole industry: For the first time in history of free e-mail, a provider offered users an inbox size of 1 GB. This marked the beginning of a head-to-head race between free e-mail providers as to who could offer the most storage space; a race that still continues today. In line with this, the launch of Gmail, has also seen storage space become a decisive factor in this competition. The result of this is that more free e-mail providers, along with larger inboxes, are also offering cloud services when it comes to file storage. This means that Google can now offer a total storage capacity of 15 GB across all the connected Google services, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. The maximum size of e-mail attachments has also increased in proportion to this growth, and now stands at 25 MB.

Just like with Gmail, Yahoo Mail is another free e-mail provider with huge amounts of storage space – a record-breaking 1000 GB (i.e. 1 TB). This has meant that deleting e-mails is very much a thing of the past. The flip side, though, is that there is no cloud storage service offered. Occasionally it is possible to use a corresponding save function as part of Dropbox, but doing this requires a separate Dropbox account. This then must be linked with the Yahoo account.

For a long time, ‘Outlook’ was the name of the Personal Information Manager (PIM) developed by Microsoft. It is part of the whole Microsoft Office package. But since early 2013, the very similar sounding web e-mail service ‘Outlook.com’ has replaced Microsoft’s previous free e-mail software ‘Hotmail’. With Outlook.com, Microsoft now provides serious competition to the free e-mail providers such as Yahoo and Google.

The first and most important advantage is its perfect integration into the Microsoft universe. By simply registering on Outlook.com, you will have access to other services offered by Microsoft. These include the video call and chat service Skype, the cloud storage service OneDrive, Office Online, and OneNote. Thanks to the presence of office interfaces, Outlook.com is also suitable for more complex work environments, and even comes with a similarly intuitive and trustworthy user interface. With regards to storage space, Outlook.com is on a similar level to Google’s Gmail service: With over 15 GB, there is more than enough space for all e-mails. A further 15 GB is available for files of a different kind with Microsoft’s integrated cloud storage solution OneDrive, which is available for free. And if you link your files via OneDrive, a further 10 GB will also become available.

GMX mail has two domains: GMX.net is the German version, while GMX.com is for English, French, and Spanish speaking users. GMX is not as well-known as the free e-mail providers discussed above, but still conveniently manages to meet all your basic e-mail requirements. One of the biggest selling points for GMX is its unlimited storage space – indeed, the software has come a long way since its offering of only 5 GB. Another major upside of GMX is its integration with Facebook. This feature means that GMX can attain contact data from Facebook, so that all your friends’ e-mails (provided that they are publicly listed) can be added to your contact list automatically. This has the potential to save quite a bit of time.

GMX is an ad-based e-mail service. This means that the interface features advertisements for products and/or services. But it must also be noted that the inbox itself only features one advertising widget. And according to the GMX privacy policy: ‘GMX may use the personally identifiable information collected by GMX to contact customers regarding products and services offered by GMX and, to the extent the user has agreed to it, by its trusted affiliates, independent contractors and business partners. We may also use this information for research purposes regarding the effectiveness of our website services, marketing, advertising and sales efforts. Except as outlined below, GMX will not in any way share this information with a third party unless you specifically authorize such disclosures.’ In terms of security, GMX is slightly different to the other major well-known e-mail providers, in that it does not provide its users with the option of using a multi-factor authentication. This leaves an account vulnerable to the danger of logins from unauthorised devices – if the user’s password somehow finds its way into the wrong hands.

GMX has both POP3 and IMAP4 support, and it is possible to read e-mails from other e-mail accounts (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com, etc.). As with the other free e-mail providers, GMX has an integrated spam filter and provides its users with an app for both Android and iOS. The simplicity and basic interface are one of the main positives of the GMX e-mail provider – and this does not affect the speed or security of the e-mail service, as it has been shown to process e-mails as efficiently and as securely as its highly-ranked competition.

Many years ago, America Online was one of the biggest e-mail programmes, but it has since slipped down the ranks and is no longer one of the most prominent e-mail services. However, this does not mean that it isn’t an adequate free e-mail provider.

A while back, AOL realised the need for it to offer more. This lead to it releasing AIM (American Instant Messaging). AIM offered 2 GB of free storage, which was seen as a huge amount of space at the time. Today, the web portal offers unlimited storage space.

AOL Mail gives you the option of choosing the strictness level of your spam filter: Low, Medium, or High. AOL themselves recommend setting it to ‘Medium’, as they find that that is the right level of security without the risk of losing any important mails to your spam folder.

Another very notable feature of AOL mail is the ‘My Address’ feature, which allows users to choose their own domain name instead of just having your e-mail address as example@aol.com. What this means is that if you have your own domain, you can set it so that your AOL mail is then routed through this address (e.g. example@yourpersonaldomain.com). Additionally, it is possible to add up to 100 people to this domain, meaning that your colleagues, employees, etc. can also all use this domain as their address, too.

AOL offer an app for both iOS and Android, but it must be noted that this app is not specific to e-mail. Instead, it brands itself as ‘AOL: Mail, News, Weather & Video’, meaning that alongside your e-mail inbox, you also will have access to the day’s headlines, weather, and trending videos. This free e-mail provider also supports both POP and IMAP protocols. Unfortunately, AOL mail does not offer the function of importing contacts from social media accounts.

Zoho is an e-mail service aimed at both private users and businesses. The free package is therefore aimed at individual users, and while being quite basic, still manages to cover all the major criteria that you might look for in a free e-mail provider.

Zoho, similarly to Microsoft, offers a whole range of software programmes. Alongside e-mail, they also offer instant messaging, a writer, calendar, document sharing, as well as several other features. Together these are known as the ‘Zoho Workplace’. The fee-based packages start at less than £2 a month with the Standard package up to the Enterprise package which costs around £6. Between these two is the £4 a month Pro package, which according to Zoho, is actually the most popular package. In a nutshell; the more money that you spend on a package, the more storage space you get and the more MBs your attachments can be. Outside of this, you will also have access to additional features as part of the Zoho Workplace.    

One major upside of Zoho is that it is completely ad-free. The software seems to pride itself on this fact, stating in the ‘Features’ section of its website that: “this means total respect for user privacy as your messages are not scanned for keywords to feed you ads. However, freedom from annoying ads is not the stand-out feature in Zoho Mail.” This in turn provides a certain peace of mind when it comes to security and privacy policy.

In terms of storage space it offers 5 GB space and a maximum e-mail attachment of 20 MB. The storage is all cloud-based and there is also the option of Dropbox integration. Security wise, the software requires two-factor authentication. Fundamentally this is a free e-mail provider, but given that it also has a range of fee-based services, the basic, free of charge version will be restricted in certain ways. Unfortunately, none of the packages offer the possibility of automatically integrating contacts from a social media account or accounts. This must be done manually.