Webmail: Get a new free email address now.
Everyone has a free webmail account. But free has never been free: Data mining, advertisements, data breaches. It's time to sign up for secure emails.
First things first: Here you can get a truly free mail account. The webmail service Tutanota comes with built-in encryption so your data is protected at all times and no one can abuse it.
What is webmail?
Webmail is an email system that can be accessed in a browser via the website of an email provider. Often webmail is free, for example Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or Tutanota.
Webmail
Pros and cons
Webmail is a great tool for communication: Always available, quick and easy email login on any device, and - as everyone has an email address - webmail is the best communication tool to reach everyone quickly. Despite the recent popularity rise of chat apps, there is no way around email, or webmail for that matter.
Email statistics
The number of email users worldwide has reached 3.9 billion users in 2019 and is projected to reach 4.48 billion by the year 2024.
This statistic shows that roughly 281 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2018. This figure is expected to increase to over 347 billion daily emails in 2022.
That's quite a lot, and that's why we need to change email now - because there is a better way.
Webmail and its tracking problem
The most popular webmail client in 2020 is Gmail (38%), followed by Apple iPhone (28%), and Outlook (9%). However the data accumulation for these findings already show everything that is wrong with webmail services:
The data gathered has been collected by tracking how many emails have been opened in these webmail clients. This tracking only works when the email loads external images, which some webmail clients do by default and others don't.
When external images are loaded automatically in the webmail client, the privacy of the webmail user is violated - most of the time without the email user knowing about this issue. The sender of the email can then learn when this person opened the email, on what client the email was opened, and from what IP address. A devastating violation of privacy that happens unnoticed in the background, and to which most users are completely ignorant.
Webmail and its profiling problem
Even worse, most free webmail service such as Gmail, Yahoo!, and GMX scan all their users' data to profile them and to post targeted advertisements. Google even tracks all your online purchases via Gmail.
By using free webmail services that harvest data, people willingly give away some of the most valuable information about themselves. The devastating part about this is that most people don't know or don't care because they believe their data is worthless. While in fact, the opposite is true.
Data mining has made Google one of the most valuable companies in the world. Because Google knows who you are, what you do, what you want and how advertisers can get you to buy their stuff, they can - and do - use your data to sell advertisements.
When using webmail services, there is one basic rule: Every webmail service that isn’t selling you something is selling you to someone else.
Email and its security problem
Webmail accounts are the number one target for email phishing attacks because your entire online identity is linked to your email address. Amazon, PayPal, Twitter, Facebook - all these services use your email address for resetting passwords, which is not only insecure, but it also puts a high priority on keeping your email account safe from hackers.
Yet, data breaches are constantly rising. Services like GMX even have the option to use "password" as a password - which makes it way to easy for malicious attackers to guess the passwords of non-tech savvy internet users.
Webmail services need to do much better to adequately protect their users' data.
Free webmail services - what users say
When you look online, you will find more and more people saying that they do not want to use free webmail services anymore because of the way they abuse their data and violate their privacy.
This is what one user explained to us when he switched to Tutanota:
"It started to get annoying when there were no decent usernames available in Gmail. Despite that, I opened an account because everyone was using Gmail. But I didn't give Gmail my phone number as I believe Google should not have such personal information about me. I often access my webmail account from a public computer, so after a while Google required I put in my phone number to access it. Whatever I tried, there was no way getting back into my Gmail account as I never entered my phone number in the first place."
"So then I decided to open a Microsoft Outlook email account. But the first thing I saw were these disgusting banner ads. So I left. Tutanota is quite the opposite: I get my name as a username, no banner ads, and an absolutely beautiful and functional user interface, plus I can get the Tutanota app from F-Droid. Tutanota is clean, simple, and yet secure and sophisticated."
Email no longer is Gmail.
For many the most popular webmail service is Gmail. But after 15 years of unlimited data mining, it is time to demand from Google to make a change. All webmail services - GMX, Outlook, Yahoo! - should stop scanning their users' personal emails and start encrypting their data to protect their right to privacy.
There are some slightly better options than these, such as Posteo, Protonmail, Fastmail - but if you look at the comparisons linked here, you will find that Tutanota is the most secure webmail service. You can also check how [Gmail compares to Protnmail and Tuta Mail]({ProtonMail vs Gmail}) if you would like to take a deep dive into differences of these email providers.
Tutanota is fast, easy, and beautiful - and it stores all your data securely encrypted. Try Tutanota's encrypted email now, and protect yourself from data mining and privacy violations.
Check out what makes Tutanota one of the best Gmail alternatives.
