All about email - electronic mail

What is email and how does it work?
What is email? - How Email Works

Let's look at what email is and how it works, plus the various formats you can use but before we do that, let's first consider whether a free email or paid email service is the better option...

Free Email - we all get one email address for free with our Internet Service Provider (such as AOL, BT, etc, etc) but there other email accounts on offer for free (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, etc).

These free email accounts are available to anyone but with the downside that the providers offer either web only access and/or you have to suffer forced advertising in your incoming and/or outgoing email messages. This forced advertising can take many forms, but is usually in the form of a banner or HTML enhanced description with link and is usually located at the bottom of every email that passes through your free account.

The advertising has more than one purpose though, firstly it is used to earn income from affiliation with the advertisers (if you buy something via an advert, the mail service gets paid a ‘commission' for it). Secondly, it is commonly used to track your emailing, browsing and buying habits, so that advertising can be tailored and a consensus of users' usual activities can be maintained. Thirdly, its use enables advertisers to analyse the effectiveness of this kind of advertising – they can track who, where and when recipients view and interact with such advertising and formulate improved advertising policies.

So, privacy can be a big issue with free email service providers, and if you would rather not have someone being concerned with your internet activities, then paid for email services are by far the better option. Storage space can be another consideration – as you send and receive emails, you will use up space.

Free email accounts have much less storage space than ‘paid for' accounts, and usually provide a limit of only 2mb to 4mb of space. Nowadays, this will quickly get used up when constructing HTML format messages and with graphics and attachments (especially when you go on holiday or are unable to check your mail box for a few days).

Paid Email – these types of email accounts have a distinct advantage over free email services in two key areas – the amount of storage space in your inbox and no advertising. As we saw before, you can expect up to only 4mb storage space for free email accounts, but paid email usually gives you five times that or more. For instance, Inbox 4 Us offers a full 10mb of storage space. Paid for email accounts do not normally include any forced advertising, and Inbox 4 Us do NOT put any advertising of any description into your incoming or outgoing emails at all.