5 FREE email platforms you can start using today

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Yes, it’s true that if you are a SkyMesh internet customer, you get access to a free basic email service.

So, no doubt you’re wondering why we’d not only tell you about competitor’s platforms but also encourage you to use one.

Well the truth of the matter is this:

SkyMesh specialise in giving you a quality internet connection with a free basic email service on the side. Other companies do email better than we do because email is at the heart of their business.

We want you to have a cracker email service to use with your SkyMesh rural internet connection, but it is internet that is at the heart of our business.

So, we’ve made a list of five companies that do email really well and we’d love you to take a closer look at them.

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For reference for SkyMesh customers: Your basic SkyMesh email service provides a 50MB mailbox and a maximum of 10MB email attachments.

5 FREE cracker email platforms and why you’d use them

Gmail

Gmail is undoubtedly the leading email platform on the market and it’s FREE for personal use!

It comes with plenty of storage space – 15GB in fact – so that you don’t need to delete emails before you can send or receive any more.

Do you remember the days when attachments larger than 5MB would result in your email being rejected by either your email provider, the recipient’s email provider, or both?

Gmail supports file attachments with up to 50MB size when users send an email message. That’s a fair few photos you can send to great-grandma of the kids.

If you have larger attachments to send, you can upload them to Google Drive (which you will get FREE access to) and just pop the file link in the body of your email. Then your recipient can download the file from the Cloud at the other end.

Security at Gmail is also pretty awesome.

In fact, if Gmail detects abnormal behaviour on your account, it may lock your account temporarily to make sure you haven’t been hacked. They also claim to block 99.9 percent of dangerous emails before they reach you and will send you a warning if they think an email they’ve delivered seems a little on the phishy side.

There are loads of other great features inbuilt with Gmail that will help you stay organised, take quick actions without fully opening an email, and join video chats straight from your inbox.

You also get immediate access to a ton of other Google powered apps like Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google News, YouTube, Google Play, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Podcasts and more.

In short, there’s a reason this is the market leader and it 100 per cent worth checking out.

CHECK OUT GMAIL

Outlook

Like Gmail, Outlook has a version that is FREE for personal use.

Outlook has been around for a very long time and has evolved incredibly well over the 24 years it’s been on the scene.

It originally launched as Hotmail in 1996 and rebranded to Outlook in 2012.

Believe it or not, there are still people out there with legacy Hotmail email addresses, but even they sign into the Outlook platform these days to send and receive their emails.

Outlook have a souped-up security offering (even for their free personal accounts) which lines up with the enterprise protections offered to business.

They’ve got data encryption taking care of your mailbox and the emails you send out into the world. They’re also great at automatically deactivating unsafe links so you don’t fall prey to phishing scams, viruses or malware.

You will get 100GB of mailbox storage with Outlook which should keep you from constantly having to clean out your emails before you can receive more.

But their cap on email attachments is a little low at 20MB in comparison to their competitors.

Also, like Gmail, Outlook gives you all your emails and calendars in one space. The bonus here is FREE access to Microsoft Office Online which includes apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

CHECK OUT OUTLOOK

Yahoo Mail

Another legendary FREE email provider!

I might be showing my age now, but my first ever email account was in 1998 when I first started Uni. It was a Yahoo account.

Yahoo Mail was officially launched in 1997, so it’s safe to say they have a few runs on the board in terms of experience.

In saying that, Yahoo Mail isn’t as feature rich as Gmail and Outlook, but they do offer the pretty standard 25MB maximum attachment size for all emails.

The major selling point for Yahoo, however, has got to be the mind-blowing 1TB of mailbox storage which means you may never have to delete an email again.

CHECK OUT YAHOO MAIL

ProtonMail

The word on the street is that Swiss owned ProtonMail is a winner, winner chicken dinner when it comes to security and privacy.

The Swiss know what they’re doing when it comes to putting people’s privacy first.

They’ve got your back with end-to-end encryption on all your emails. That means no-one – not even ProtonMail – can read your emails!

It also means they sacrifice some pretty clever automation and AI features (that you’ll find standard with the likes of Gmail) in favour of pretty serious security provisions.

There are some other limitations with the FREE account option from this provider too.

For example, you can only send 150 emails a day. To be fair, if you manage to exceed that quota, you’ve gone really hard core on the emailing and may be at risk of a repetitive strain injury.

The biggest drawback is going to be the 500MB mailbox storage limit. You will be forever deleting emails.

These guys have the standard 25MB limit on email attachments so when it comes to size limits, ProtonMail are not wowing anybody.

You can always upgrade and pay for an account. All pricing is in Euros though so just remember that when taking a look at the upgrade features.

And if you are thinking of choosing a paid ProtonMail account, I would go back and take a closer look at the free Gmail and Outlook accounts first.

Obviously, your final decision is going to depend on which features are most important to you.

CHECK OUT PROTONMAIL

Zoho Mail

Zoho can be used for personal use but even their FREE version has really been geared-up for businesses.

That becomes obvious from the outset because you need to have your own registered domain before you can even sign up for an email account.

You can purchase a domain through Zoho Mail if you don’t already have one. But, unless you’re running a business of some description, this may all be a bit of overkill.

Zoho Mail might be a good one to look at if you’re a solopreneur!

I say this because as an all-encompassing suite, Zoho stretches much more broadly than email.

It has a ton of business-oriented apps covering everything from a CRM to finance and HR management through to IT and Help Desk solutions.  All of these features obviously fall into paid enterprise plans, but it is very impressive if you’re looking beyond personal use.

Personal users of Zoho Mail receive a free 5GB mailbox and can send emails with attachments up to 25MB.

CHECK OUT ZOHO MAIL

Compare email providers

What about my SkyMesh email account?

If you’re a SkyMesh customer, you can definitely stick with your very basic SkyMesh email account but like I mentioned upfront, email is not our area of speciality.

Our specialty is amazing internet connections and even better customer service.

We’re telling you about these other guys because they’ve made email their business and they do it really well.

At SkyMesh, you only have 50MB of storage in your mailbox which can fill up really quickly. But if you get a new email address, with another email provider and a much bigger mailbox, you can redirect your SkyMesh emails to that new address without worrying about missing out on anything.

Don’t already have a SkyMesh internet connection? See what connection type is available where you live.

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