Emails services we use, our privacy concerns and our choices.

Email has become part and parcel of our life. Postal service has become thing of the past. Even fax has been replaced by email service because why not send a scanned copy of your document via email rather than a black and white fax. The requirement of email for using nearly every service on internet has made email into a basic necessity, every time you sign up for any thing on the internet, you would not be able to do it if you lack an email address but apart from that email address has become a sort of identity for every person, or organisation.

Having said that email has made life a lot easier than it was before when only postal service and fax was present but along with that ease we also lost our privacy. When in previous era some sent you a letter via postal mail, it was understood that no one else had read it and you were the only person to open the envelope but things are not the same in case of email. Unlike postal mail email is vulnerable to be read by third parties.

Firstly we use email on our laptops, tablet and smartphone. anyone who has access to any of the three may easily access our emails but lets say this in not the case even then so our email is not secure because of the involvement of different connections, routers and servers owned by different companies. This means that even if your connection is secure there is no guarantee that other connections would be secure too. Your email could be accessed at different points either physically or virtually. Even when some server wants to backup their data you email is also stored in that backup which then becomes a kind of archive laying there to be read by anyone with access.

Lets suppose we somehow manage to get secure services for our emails but then their is the government surveillance thing. what choice do you have now when even the government "whose job is to protect the privacy of its citizens is after your emails destroying your privacy in ways you cant even imagine one example of which is the NSA’s PRISM surveillance Program. In united states "Electronic Communications Privacy Act" was introduced which means after 180 days your email no longer remains a protected communication. it just become a sort of database record. So if a government agency want a public access to your emails instead of PRISM system, they would only require a subpoena—instead of a warrant to access your email. Other countries of the world lacks even this 180 days of protection.

Source of image is Wikipedia

Source of image is Wikipedia

Many companies around the world have made efforts to make email more secure, but ever since the shutdown of Lavabit which was considered to be the most secure email service to date (reportedly used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden) and Silent Circle by government surveillance programs it has become virtually impossible to have a secure email service Unless otherwise some other system is introduced which is completely based on some newer platform and does not use any of the resources used by email.

Concluding that having a secure email service is not achievable so there is no point in looking for secure email service provider, so lets discuss different email service providers and their pros and cons.

Cost
Whenever we need an email service the first thing we look for is that the service is provided free of cost. fortunately there are many available like some used internationally Hotmail, yahoo-mail and Gmail and some other providers that are limited to specific countries like Mail.ru which is Russian email service and AOL mail which provide services in united states. Thanks to advertisements the biggest tech giants like Microsoft and Google provides email services with ads for free to users.

Data Storage
Hotmail and yahoo were the leading email service providers in the past decade when there was no Gmail. Apart from the fact that they gave each user a limited storage space and if a user was unable to use the service for more than two months they would just delete all their data and important emails and in order to receive new emails you were forced to re-activate you email. Then Gmail was born and apart from free service it brought an end to the data storage limits and the fear of loosing all the email because of not being able to log in for long time. Millions have left Hotmail and Yahoo Mail and started using Gmail for just the two reasons mentioned  above but these are not the only reasons. The only other reason that kept people attracted to yahoo and Hotmail was their messenger service but since the arrival of Skype and other VOIP services people no longer are interested in messengers too. The fact that Gmail is faster, easier to use and even lighter to load have made the future of other email services very dark.

Quality of Service
I personally  have maintained both yahoo and Gmail services but when ever i check Yahomail its like a headache.  Most of the times when the inbox opens i am unable to open any email. just keep on clicking emails and nothing seems to be working. Its like if the page is dead. At first i thought something was wrong with my computer but when i opened other websites in other tabs they worked just fine, the problem was only within Yahoo-mail service. since the past few weeks i have now set forwarding on yahoo to my Gmail account so that i don't have to keep waiting for yahoo mail to open.

Ease of use
After checking all email service providers , Gmail turned out to be the easiest to use specially with the auto draft system which saves your incomplete email after every few seconds so you wont have to start from scratch again in case of any unexpected power failure or some issues with your PC.

Now that Google had introduced services like YouTube and GooglePlus it has become nearly impossible for other email service providers to compete with Gmail. Some websites discuss that Google reads our emails to provide relevant advertisements so its not secure. Then again as we have concluded that emails can never be secure so who cares if some bots read the emails to display relevant ads.

I hope after reading this post you would now stop looking for security and privacy in email services and instead look for quality and ease of use in service.

Comments are welcomed you you want to share your views.