Free e-mail services exist because of advertising earnings
It is difficult to imagine, that in our time of high technologies there exist places, where progress didn’t come. And if coming progress can theoretically reduce possible profit, it tends to be limited.
As you know, the most of free e-mail services exist because of advertising earnings that is shown to the Users in the web-interface of mailbox. That’s why the Internet web giants of web industry are not in a hurry to give a free access to mailboxes through the POP3 and SMTP protocols. No doubt they wouldn’t want the effectiveness of their advertising to be reduced greatly.Such giants as Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and AOL.com have many users who are attached to other services of the companies and they are being slow to provide users with such access, just because people got used to use the web interface.
Surely there exist some methods to evade these restraints. For example, there are programs of third-party writers for Yahoo.com who convert the web-traffic into POP3. However, it is possible to steal mailbox passwords with the help of such programs which reduces a wish to use them. For Hotmail.com by MSN.com there is a possibility to use a special protocol, which is integrated into Outlook Express, and is not available to other email program developers, which also limits the user’s freedom to choose an email program. AOL.com has an access through POP3 and SMTP, but it is available for users to have an access to the Internet only from that provider. That also limits the opportunities of using an email, because there are places without an access to the Internet from AOL.com.
But, they lose a lot trying to hold the old marketing policy oriented for on-line publicity limiting the users choice. There is another way to monetize visitors, attracting users and keeping them. Such new model of user treatment was Google.com Company and its e-mail service - Gmail.com. Users have the access to POP3 and SMTP interfaces, which does not limit the user’s opportunities to work with the email. However this service has a great advantage over common mailing applications like Outlook Express - it is a big volume of mailbox disk space allowing user to keep all the e-mails straight at the server and get access to its’ mailbox from any part of the world.Plus, only relevant advertising is shown to a user, no bothering banners! Such format attracts more and more users of e-mail - because the convenience web-interface allows forgetting the problem of the mail programs installation.
At the end the e-mail of the Future is imagined as web-interface without using the mail programs. Most probably Yahoo.com, MSN.com and AOL.com will use this model in the future, because such approach better than the old methodic with the using of mail programs.Even POP3 and SMTP have served their time because the Gmail.com notice about new mail you can get by means of RSS channels.