Free Email Address – Why Pay for what You Can for Free?

While email may have begun as an internal service at MIT in 1965 it has gone on to become an integral part of our daily lives. The vast majority of the world's businesses and a large portion of its citizens have come to rely on email to conduct the bulk of their business and personal communications. When email was first introduced to the public on the Internet the only services available had to be paid for as they were attached directly to the hosting companies. The idea of a free email address did not come along for many years.

The First Free Email Address

When the Internet began to grow as more people purchased personal computers and got online, the need for something better than the pay email services became more and more apparent. In 1996 to two friends Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith created the first web based email service and called it HoTMaiL using the letters HTML to create the name. HTML is the code that is used by the web without which none of us could use the web. This service was offered to the public for free and proved to be so successful that it was soon bought out by Microsoft for $400 million and renamed Microsoft Hotmail.

Next Up Yahoo!

Yahoo began life as a book about the World Wide Web written by a pair of graduate student at Stanford University in 1994. The two friends David Flo and Jerry Wang originally title the book "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but quickly retitled it as Yahoo since they both liked the meaning of the word and felt that it applied to the current state over the web. In 1995 they established Yahoo as a web portal. In 1997 they became the second web service to offer people a free email address after they purchased Rocket Mail and renamed it Yahoo email.

Google Me

As Google reached the pinnacle of success and became the leading search engine on the web they were constantly searching for new ways to reach their audience and capture an even bigger part of the Internet. In 2004 they released their email service Gmail to the public as a beta test program.

At first the ability to get a free email address was limited to invitation only, but in recent years Google opened the floodgates to where anyone can get a Gmail address. In order to secure more business clients Google announced the end of the beta testing phase in July of 2009 and with the host of features including live chat it soon became one of the most popular free email services on the web.

For individual email accounts having a free email address is one of the most popular ways to gain access to emails. However when you are running a business and rely on being able to send emails to the people on your mailing list without them being dumped in the spam box a free email address service may not be the best way to go. Many spam filters tend to reroute these emails to the spam box due to the use of sophisticated spam filters, if you are in a business that uses mass emailing to reach your clients you may need to use an email hosting service to make sure that your emails are getting through.