Top 10 Best Free Email Accounts

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June 29, 2021 Business

Email accounts, we need them for booking tickets, signing up for websites, communicating with companies, and more. Despite some thoughts that email is dead as now we have chat platforms and collaboration tools, still, we use email every day.

Not every email provider is completely free, and with free services, you often have to pay with your data. Advertisers and marketers love email as they can send ads directly to your inbox. They just have to know your email address. For this reason, it’s important to choose your email service provider carefully.

Webmail providers

Almost all free email providers offer access to users’ mailboxes via webmail. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Outlook are some of the most common webmail services.

You can get access to your mailbox in your browser with the help of a web client of the mail service. Moreover, most email services have their own apps for Android and iOS or allow you to send email to apps and desktop clients using IMAP and POP3 email protocols. Furthermore, you can send Email to SMS from your email account with services like SMSGlobal.

These email protocols transfer emails from the server to the desktop client that you use. Once downloaded from the server, the emails are stored locally, and you can have them offline

What is IMAP?

IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) allows you to get multiple email accounts. This means that all letters appear in the same app or desktop client, such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or Apple’s email client.

What is POP3?

POP3 (Post Office Protocol) allows you to get one email account so that all letters from that account would be displayed locally in the app or desktop client that you choose.

Free Email

1. Gmail

Gmail is one of the most popular email providers. In 2018, it had 1.5 billion active users.

Gmail also has the highest market share according to Litmus Labs, a market share rating. However, due to the way this rating works, it’s not such a reliable source. Litmus Labs calculates the ranking based on image opening (pixel tracking) by email users. As a result, data for some email clients and mobile devices may be over- or underestimated because of the automatic image blocking.

When an email service provider (such as Gmail) ranks high on such a website, it means that marketers can easily track its users. Marketers get this data automatically as soon as images are uploaded in an email. Gmail provides free access to add your own email signature. On the other hand, services that provide privacy block automatic image uploads to protect their users from such tracking.

As for Gmail, it doesn’t properly protect its users from being tracked. Quite the opposite, Gmail is known for its extensive tracking and profiling of Google and Gmail users. Google offers free services and then makes an astounding amount of money by showing targeted ads to its users.

Is it worth getting a Gmail account? If you need 15GB of free storage and don’t mind Google’s targeted ads and collecting your data, then Gmail will be good for you.

2. Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail offers 1TB of free storage, which makes it one of the email providers with the biggest free disk space. Moreover, Yahoo! Mail doesn’t differ much from other free email services in features and usability.

Thanks to a well-designed search tool, you can easily find any photo or attachment you’ve ever shared. This makes Yahoo! Mail suitable for people who share a lot of attachments.

However, some reviews state that many features don’t work or are only half-implemented. Another reason for the decline in popularity in recent years is caused by scandals. The most famous one is when Yahoo gave access to all of its email accounts to U.S. authorities. Thus, Yahoo! Mail is very similar to Gmail in terms of tracking and profiling users.

Is it worth getting a Yahoo! Mail account? If you want 1TB of free storage, and you don’t mind Yahoo! using your data and flooding your inbox with ads, this service is good for you.

3. Outlook

Outlook, formerly known as Hotmail, belongs to Microsoft. Anyone can get a free outlook.com email account and use it as webmail or in email clients such as Microsoft Outlook.

Just like Gmail, it has 15GB of free storage, a clean interface, and lots of features. Outlook also allows you to connect many other services, such as Skype, Facebook, PowerPoint, PayPal, scheduling apps like Bookafy or task management programs like Trello.

Is it worth getting an Outlook account?

If you’re already used to the Outlook desktop client and don’t mind Microsoft spying on you, a personal Outlook email account is the way to go.

4. GMX Mail

GMX has been around since 1997, making it one of the oldest services out there. It offers 65 GB of free storage and allows sending files up to 50 GB in size. This is great if you want to share lots of photos or videos. However, you should remember that all data sent through GMX, as well as all attachments, can be accessed by the provider.

Like others, GMX follows an advertising-based business model. It regularly sends emails from marketing partners to your inbox.

Is it worth getting a GMX account? If you don’t mind ads in your inbox, and you often have to share large files, then GMX Mail is great for you.

5 – 8. Paid email service providers

If you use one of the free email providers of the list above, you still pay, not with money, but with your data and, as a result, your privacy.

If you are ready to pay for email services, you can choose those providers that don’t use or sell your data for their own profit. Here’s our list:

Hushmail, based in the U.S.A., $9,99 a month;
Fastmail, based in Australia, $3 a month;
Startmail, based in the Netherlands, $59,95 a year;
Posteo, based in Germany, €1 a month.

9 and 10. Protonmail and Tutanota

But, if your privacy is important for you, and you don’t want to see ads in your inbox, there are 2 free email services: Protonmail and Tutanota. These are mentioned in every good review about free email providers.

Both offer a free mailbox. There is a basic paid mailbox in Tutanota that costs €1 per month and the one in Protonmail costs €5 per month. While both Protonmail and Tutanota focus on protecting user privacy, they have many differences when it comes to security and open source.

For example, Tutanota doesn’t use Google Push and uses F-Droid instead. Tutanota also supports U2F for two-factor authentication, which is the most secure two-factor authentication option.