We ended last time talking about my foray into “free” email through Yahoo!Mail. This week I signed up for another “free” email service – Microsoft’s MSN Hotmail. I found the experience to be quite similar, although Hotmail’s registration process thankfully had the many requests for information (advertising) more up front and turned off by default. Again, “free” is a misnomer. There was advertising everywhere I turned. Even the emails I sent to other people had an omnipresent advertisement where my “signature” would be. Blecch! (a technical term for disgust).

There’s another “free” email service on the horizon, from the folks at Google. It’s called Gmail, and features a whopping one gigabyte of storage (Hotmail gives you all of two megabytes). Gmail will leverage Google’s search features to help organize your email. It will also offer spam filtering and automatic filing of related messages in respective mailboxes. Gmail will not display the pop-up or banner ads so prevalent in the other “free” services – all ads will be “relevant” text ads.

What does “relevant” mean? How does Google know an ad is “relevant” to me? Let’s say I sign up for Gmail when it goes public (it’s not available yet – it’s still in limited beta testing). I receive an email from a friend with the title “Britney Spears concert in Boston” (I know, I know. Look, it’s just an example, OK). The text is “Did you get the tickets for the big Britney Spears concert in Boston next month?”

I reply, “Sure did, Dude. Hey, you wanna get some good seafood before the show?” You get the idea. Anyway, Gmail’s search technology will find key words in my private email and use them to place “relevant” ads alongside the text of my email. So, in the browser window displaying my email, for our example above, I could find text ads (with web links) for concert ticket sales outlets, concerts in Boston, seafood restaurants in Boston, Britney Spears sites (yikes), etc., etc., etc. Gmail claims that “the matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers”. Nothing can go wrong – go wrong – go wrong.

To sum up, “free” email services require no cash outlay, but the cost in security, privacy, and advertising may be high. Speaking of cash outlay, “free” email services will be happy to decrease or get rid of nagging advertising, and give you added capabilities, for an additional fee. These fees range from $10 per month to $100 per year, depending upon the amount of advertising you’re willing to put up with. They can cost as much as an ISP like Earthlink.

How do you want/like/need to access your email? Yahoo!Mail, Gmail, and others are only accessible through web browsers (and we know how secure Internet Explorer is). You can, however, access and manage MSN Hotmail through the dedicated email application Outlook Express.

So, is “free” email right for you? If you don’t have your own computer, or you don’t have your own way onto the internet, or you don’t have any money, I guess, then “free” email can at least keep you in touch. You can also insulate your primary email address from spam using a secondary free email address.

Simply sign up for a free address, then use that address to “register” for all the stuff that we’ve talked about that can get you spammed. When the spam comes pouring in, close the free account and open another.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski