Disadvantages Of Using Free Email Services Like Yahoo, Google Etc

Most of us use free email services to create email accounts and maintain them. Sometimes we use these email accounts to send very important emails. I also have experienced this. But there are times we hate these email services due to many reasons. I will describe some disadvantages of these free email services in this post.

The most important disadvantage is the security and privacy. We cannot control our privacy and security of our emails and profile data. All the free email service providers including Gmail, Yahoo and hotmail say that they guarantee the full privacy. But can we make sure that they actually do that. Most of us receive unwanted emails (spam) even if we don't provide our email addresses to a third party. Some of you may know that many free email services sell their email addresses to various marketing companies. Therefore we can't believe on the guarantees of these free email service providers.

Another disadvantage is most of these free email services provides simple web based email facilities where we can't do many modifications. For an example if we use Gmail web interface to send an email, it is very hard to add a picture from our local machine instead of sending as an attachment. It also limits the customization of text and images. It is hard to add a customized email signature also.

Many companies provide free email services to make it as a good advertising and marketing medium. Actually that's all they want and don't care about how it affects the email user. For an example when you log into your Gmail or Yahoo email account, you will see advertisements in the right side and top. This is not a big headache in Gmail, but in Yahoo it is a real headache especially with their new webmail interface. I'm not comfortable with it and actually it is a headache for me. I think that most of you feel in the same way. It is possible to assume that we will lose our actual email workspace size in the coming future where more and more advertising and marketing methods are added to our web email interface. Up to now, there is one way that we can stop this by configuring an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird for our email account.

As far as I know, some companies and individuals pay less attention to the emails they receive from free email services addresses as they experience that most of them are spam. Due to this, there is a great possibility that they will miss very important emails sent to them. This will also affect us if we send important emails from free email services.
Therefore it is better if you can have a personal email account in your own domain (Ex. [email protected]) if it is affordable. If not, make sure that you use an email client and put an attractive mail subject where the receiver will put more attention to your email.

Source: [nairaland.com]