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Any form of free e-mail service, especially
one that is web-based. Free-mail services have been extremely successful as
they enable anyone with access to a browser to have their own e-mail
account. Often used by students and travellers, free-mail is also popular
with people who need to keep business and personal e-mail accounts separate.
The biggest free-mail service by far is Microsoft's Hotmail, which now
claims over 110m users,. Some estimates show that the total number of
free-mail accounts worldwide now exceeds 600m.
Despite their
low-rent image, free-mail accounts are broadly equal in capability to
traditional pop-based accounts, with the added advantage that they
make it to possible to pick up e-mail from almost any machine in the world
with an internet connection. Most provide the ability to filter
incoming mail; send, receive and virus-check attachments;
maintain an online address book; copy messages to multiple
recipients; and even retrieve mail from pop accounts.
There are, inevitably, some problems with free-mail. Performance is
generally slower than pop, as servers are often heavily loaded
and it takes longer for messages to download, More worrying for
unwary users is security, especially on shared machines, as incoming mail is
stored in the browser's cache and can often be accessed by anyone
with a little browser knowledge. The biggest problem for most users is the
vast amount of spam that free-mail accounts generate. Well over 1
billion messages a day are sent from Hotmail accounts alone, many of which
are unsolicited by the people who receive them. Anyone can set up an
anonymous free-mail account simply by providing unverified personal
information, and many people do so for spamming purposes alone. In
conjunction with an anonymiser service, free-mail accounts are
effectively untraceable unless you resort to expensive court proceedings
against the service provider. |
