Why 'Free' E-mail accounts are worth exactly
what you pay for them, Nothing
Introduction:
Mr. Bill is not 'for' or 'pro' Free e-mail accounts, such as Yahoo,
Hotmail, Netscape Mail, etc. etc. etc. , and there are some fairly sound
security, reliability, personal privacy reasons for this. I'm going
to outline those reasons, here, and you can choose to continue your free
e-mail and/or change to some other form. At least if you read what
i have written, you will know the risks associated with such services, and
so you will be a more informed consumer. If you are more informed, then you
make better decisions, and that is all I have offer - is to help you
make better decisions...
You perceive this service to be "free" but what youa re not seeing / recognizing
is the following:
- Free service means that the service-provider (Yahoo / HotMail
/ etc.) are 'collecting data' about you, about your preferences, about
who you e-mail to, and about the web-sites you visit. Regardless of
whether or not they use / sell / give-away, or just "reduce" that data
and sell the reduced data, are you willing to 'give-up' your personal data
in this manner
- Free service means, also, that all your e-mails reside on their
server (typically in some far-off state or country). When they hold all your
e-mails there are several 'risks' that you face:
-
- they will lose or corrupt your e-mails ( and it may be that you 'trust'
them, but do you 'trust' all their employees?)
- they will sell the content of your e-mails to someone else
- some nefarious person on the network between your computer and their
e-mail server will 'steal' your e-mail
- you will spend a LOT of time (say 30 minutes) creating an e-mail and
then your computer or network connection "goes down" and you have lost /
wasted the time you spent creating the e-mail. - This shouldn't happen if
you have a Personal Computer at home with it's own 'e-mail client software
package.
- Free service means, that, you have to be 'bombarded' with the
advertising that pays the bills for the e-mail server(s) and the staff and
networks to support them. IF you use your own PC and our own copy
of an e-mail client software package, then you do not have to 'put up with'
the advertising.
last updated: Wednesday_24_April_2002; nsc6.2;
revID: 1a