Introduction

Electronic mail is an essential means of modern communication. Billions of emails are sent and received by individuals and corporate bodies across the globe. There are hundreds of email services across the web and each service provider boast features that are designed to appeal to target users. Email Service providers can be generally grouped into two major categories - Free email or Paid Email. Lets look at the two briefly.

Free Email

The name says it all. Free email providers offer their services at no financial cost to users. Anyone is free to log on the mail platform, sign up and start accessing the services. As many people enjoy free things, free mail services are basically the most popular. A lot of them will come to your mind, buy Gmail and Yahoomail are certainly the two most popular free mail providers globally.

While free mail appears to be free, it actually has some hidden costs. For example, the provider have access to your personal data and can exchange it for financial gain without your knowledge or authorization. Additionally, they can generate revenue through ads and other promoted content. So while it appears to be free since there are no subscription fees to pay, free mail has some hidden costs which are not really financial in nature. We also have paid emails.

Free emails are easily identified through the email address. The address end with the domain name of the service provider. For example, Yahoomail addresses usually end with @yahoo.com. Google mail addresses end with @gmail.com. There are many other email service providers and they do end with the domain name of the provider.

Paid Email

Like the name suggests, paid emails require users to pay some fee to access the email service. There could be sign up fees and periodic renewals fees to continue making use of the email service. Paid mail is not too popular in the personal user sector since many individuals may not have need for privacy protection and other premium features.

Paid email is paid because of certain added features which may not be available in free mail. So when deciding to choose between free or paid email, the individual or organization needs will largely determine if they go for free or paid.

Paid email is also easily identified by looking at the domain. They usually have custom domain of the user. Unlike do free mail addresses, paid mail domains are unique and usually chosen by each user of the service

So below, we look at some reasons why one may prefer free or paid email.

Free versus Paid mail - the Features

Free mail and Paid mail all come with features that usually determines the choice you will make. Of course, we are not going into look into service features here. We want to see how each mail service fares Under the following considerations:

1. Cost: This is the first thing that many ordinary users look at. But here it is self-explanatory. Free mail requires no payments by the user. Paid mail requires users to pay some fees to sign up and periodically. While there are no obvious financial costs to using free mail, there are other ways providers make money with your email account.

2. Branding: Organizations want to sell a unue brand to the public. Like I said earlier, free mail does not have a unque domain. All yahoomail addresses for example, must end with @yahoomail.com. For ordinary users that need email to connect with family and friends, this is nothing. But for organizations that are wary of their business image, free mail is not the answer. When your clients or customers see your business email end in the name of the business, it leaves a lasting impression.

3. Security: When it comes to free mail, security is never the priority. Little wonder that hackers find it easy to break emails hosted by a free service because their is no enhanced security features. Paid email come loaded with security features that make it ideal for organizations. Paid mail gives you better security to share sensitive data and files. Security is one big reason many organizations go for paid mail.

4. Privacy: There is little data privacy in free mails. The service providers cannot guarantee that user data will not be shared with third parties. In fact, it has been alleged that many free email service providers sell or have sold user data in order to generate revenue. Besides, running revenue-generating programs is something free email providers do and this endangers the.

Webhosting services offer paid mail

There are many providers of paid email as a standalone product. You can actually subscribe to their paid email service, pay some fee and start using them. However, if you are a web master like me and you host websites, there is no need to bother about paid mail. Almost all web hosting companies offer webmail as part of their service. So with this, you can create many custom emails from your Cpanel.

I will demonstrate how to create such mail from the Cpanel provided by one of my hosts. See the steps below:

Note: My website is https://steemjewelry.com/. Its a full Linux hosting, so it comes with the industry-standard Cpanel.

Step 1: I will access the Cpanel securely through https://steemjewelry.com:2083/

Step 2: I will enter my username in A, my password in Box B and I will click the button labelled C to login securely. (Check image below)

Step 3: I will click on Email Accounts labelled D in the image below:

Step 4: To my far right side of the next window, I will Click Create labelled E, to open the new window where I will create the account.

Step 5: I will enter my preferred username in box F, a password in Box G and click the button labelled H to create the new mail.

Congratulations, the new mail has been created. As you rightly noticed, my website address is https://steemjewelry.com. Since I choose enquiries as the email username, the address of the email is then [email protected]. That custome domain name is the easiest way to make your company or business mail stand out.

In my next post, I will show how to access the mail.

Conclusion

Free mail is good, but come with some hidden costs in data privacy, security and other things. Paid mail is certainly the best even for individuals. I hope you will make an informed decision after going through this article.

Delegate to SteemAlive

50SP	100SP	300SP	500SP
1000SP	2000SP	3000SP	5000SP

Click here to see our delegators

Subscribe:::Discord.
:::Telegram :::join trail