are free email services like Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Mail and others worth the low cost?
NO!
As always, it depends on your needs and your expectations. Unfortunately, many people’s expectations are very, very wrong.
What does free email really cost.
By now you should know there’s no such thing as “free” – everything has a cost. It may not come a monthly bill, but there’s definitely a cost.
Here are some of the costs that I associate with free email services:
There is no customer service for FREE email accounts.
Free email services seem to receive a disproportionate amount of spam. There are various theories about why, but the fact is that you’ll get more spam with a free mail service than with a regular ISP. Some are better at filtering it than others, but the amount of spam that each service deals with is enormous – and often legitimate email is a casualty of the battle.
A disproportionate amount of SPAM at least appears to come from With “From: spoofing” it’s debatable how much actually does, but the fact is spammers regularly sign up for and abuse free email accounts, or work to make it look like their spam is coming from free email accounts. The result is that free email services come with a built-in penalty – email from a free email service is slightly more likely to be evaluated as and filtered as SPAM.
For all intents and purposes, there is no customer service for free email accounts. This is truly a case of “you get what you pay for”. While there might be web forms and email address that will accept your question, your chances of getting a response are often proportional to what you paid – zero.
Most free services have limits of how much email you can send in any given time period. Often there are other limits placed on functionality should you choose to use, or are restricted to using the service’s web-based interface.
In my opinion, based on the questions that I receive and the problems that I see every day, the lack of responsive customer service, as well as the sometimes serious deliver ability issues are by far the biggest reasons to be very cautious when considering a free email account. Not to mention if you are a business you should use your own domain name.