But your e-mail might not be as private as you think. Mail or other freem ail account, remember these services are prone to be less secure than your employer's or your ISP's mail service. Free e-mail, or freemail, accounts have fast become prime bait to attract consumers and businesspeople to the burgeoning array of Internet portal sites. Users have a reason to come back every day or use the site as a start page. Users benefit by having a universally accessible, personal e-mail account.
Users also have to deal with service outages and slow response times.
And businesses have to deal with what can become their employees' rogue messaging system, over which they have no control. Employees might spend time that they should be working tending to their personal freemail accounts. They might even engage in disloyal or libelous behavior through freemail that could come back to haunt their employers. Above all, the privacy of freemail is in question. Hackers don't have to worry about encryption or corporate firewalls.