Why You Should Use Private Email Hosting?

Introduction

306 billions of emails are sent by 4 billions of people in 2020¹. 86% professionals have named email as their frequent and favourite means of communication² and 47 % mails are checked on the phones³. The frequency of email usage is thus very high. In Businesses, cost of marketing in email is the least and it is said to be the one which brings in maximum return of investment. However, email is the least safe communication method if priority to the security isn’t given enough.

Criteria For a Reliable Email Service Provider

When choosing an email service provider, the most important traits to be considered are privacy, reliability, availability, features. Privacy aspect ensures the only the authorised people have access to the content in the inbox, reliability ensures the email service performs to the expectation, availability ensures the email service is available to the authorised people  whenever they want, features aspect ensures the email service consists of the features that eases the emailing process.

Risks Associated with Free Email Service Providers

Nowadays, many people get used to free email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc.. and some even use the email service of their Internet Service provider (ISP), but they posses a significant number of risks, as they come with a string attached to them. Free email service providers are known to routinely scan content in inboxes to monetise the platform, and it has been proved many times⁴. On top of that, free email services like Gmail was accused of sharing private content in email messages with US government⁵, and google employees were caught spying on people whom they know⁶. The same story can be said about Outlook, and Yahoo as well⁷. If big players have a notorious past like this,  it’s safe to assume no free email service is free from privacy violations. Reliability is quite good in a lot of popular free email services, but availability can be problematic as the user doesn’t own either the email or the platform. There are thousands of horror stories on the Internet how people lost access to their inbox, because the service provider suspended them for breaching their terms of services. Losing access to the inbox can not only jeopardise their business, but also their personal life as well, as many people depend on their emails to do their day to day activities.

Importance of Private Email Services

Due to aforesaid risks associated with free email service providers, every business should consider getting a private email. It adds to the reputation of the brand and ensures customer trust, and builds up a secure network among different partners.

The main Advantages of a private email service provider.

1. Privacy and Security:  The private email services are free from advertisements, data gathering to sell for advertisement networks. In addition, some of the private email services such as Tutanota, ProtonMail are located in Switzerland that is known as a privacy heaven.
2. Features: Private email services are rich in features, such as ability to use your own domain, multiple aliases, multiple inboxes, extra space, and premium support.
3.  Ownership: Since private email services allow to use your own domain name, it secures the ownership of all the emails associated with that domain. This is quite useful in case if the platform suspended the client from their space. Since the client has the ownership to the domain, it can be taken to anywhere to resume the activities. If Gmail like service suspended the user from their platform, the user losses the privilege to use their email name as well (username@gmail.com)
4. Flexibility: Since the domain name, and the platform are decoupled, the client has the ability to change their email service provider in any time without affecting to emails. In addition, they can host the email service in their own network when they are capable of doing that without losing access to their email names.
5. Support: Private email services provide excellent private support compared to free email services. There are a lot of support engineers waiting behind the line to help their client base at any time. Free email services don’t provide private support; hence it’s difficult to deal with errors without having any technical knowledge.
6. Accountability: private email services have a greater accountability over free services, as they are frequently used by businesses. Free email service can shut down itself, or an account of any user at anytime with or without any reason. Private email services regularly backup their data to ensure the high data availability, in case if the client lost access to their data in the inbox.

1. https://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2017-2021-Executive-Summary.pdf [↩]
2. https://blog.zerobounce.net/2019/12/06/15-facts-know-email/ [↩]
3. https://www.emailmonday.com/mobile-email-usage-statistics/ [↩]
4. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/a824bd/we_all_know_google_automatically_scans_gmail_this/ [↩]
5. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gmail-users-privacy-email-lawsuit [↩]
6. https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats [↩]
7. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data [↩]