Hi. Craig Peterson here with a blink into using webmail securely.
The first free Webmail email services started in 1996. Remember Hotmail and Rocketmail? My friend Gary still uses Hotmail.
Today, the most popular Webmail service is gmail, followed by outlook.com.
But free doesn’t mean free. You’re paying for it with a lack of privacy, because you are the product. These free email services are mining your emails looking to develop data that they can sell to advertisers, political campaigns, and even governments.
Although free email services are convenient for sending personal correspondence, you should not use them to send messages containing sensitive or business information.
Gmail, Hotmail, and others provide you with:
- Easy accessibility and plenty of competitive features
- Some offer large amounts of storage, spam filtering, virus protection, and enhanced fonts and graphics to lure people in.
But there are risks to your security, privacy, and reliability
- Hackers spent months with full access to Outlook, Hotmail, and MSN email accounts—and got in through Microsoft’s customer support platform.
- Remember, You aren’t paying for your email account, but the service provider has to find some way to recover the costs of providing the service thru selling advertising space, and selling or trading information
- Although you may be able to access your account from any computer, you need to make sure that the account is going to be available when you want to access it
