The email remains one of the most popular and effective means of digital communication in the business world. Every company, regardless of size and industry, needs an email address to connect with customers, partners, and suppliers. For small businesses and startups, the question often arises: “Can we use a free email for our company?” The short answer is yes, you can. But should you? Let’s find out!
Free Email For Company:
Free Email for Companies: What Is It and Why Does It Exist?
➡️ Free email is exactly what it sounds like – an email service that you can use without paying any money. Some of the most well-known providers that offer free email for companies and regular users alike are:
Popular Providers for Free Business Email Addresses:
Google’s email service offers a user-friendly interface, 15 GB of storage, and seamless integration with other Google applications like Google Drive and Google Calendar.
Not to be confused with the popular desktop email client, Outlook.com is Microsoft’s free email service and the direct successor to Hotmail. Just like Gmail, it offers 15 GB of storage, and the email address you get gives you access to Microsoft’s vast digital ecosystem.
Despite being one of the oldest mail providers and the target of several data breaches, Yahoo Mail is still widely used today, largely because it gives all new users 1,000 GB of storage – far more than its competitors.
A lesser-known option from India that offers business-friendly features even in its free tier. Zoho Mail integrates well with Zoho’s other services, including its customer relationship management and invoicing software.
Another long-standing provider that continues to offer free email services. Since its launch in 1993, AOL Mail has transformed several times, and users can now access their mailboxes even on mobile devices thanks to a mobile app for iOS and Android.
Free Business Emails: What’s the Catch?
Considering that the above-listed and other providers of free email offer so much storage space and utility without seemingly asking anything in return, you might wonder: “What’s the catch?” The truth is, these services aren’t truly “free” in the strictest sense. There’s an old saying in the tech world: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” This applies to free email services as well.
⚠️ These “free” email providers often have ulterior motives. They may use your data for targeted advertising, train their machine learning models with your content, or try to lock you into their broader ecosystem of products and services. The email providers gain more from hosting and delivering your emails for free than the estimated cost of providing the service – that’s their business model.
➡️ However, just because the cost of free email isn’t monetary doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a good option for your company. To determine if free email is the right fit for you, it’s necessary to consider its pros and cons.
Pros & Cons of Free Email for Companies
Every business has unique needs and priorities, so the impact of free email’s advantages and disadvantages can vary dramatically from one company to another. With that in mind, we’ve put together the following list of pros and cons to help you make a well-informed decision about using free email services for your business needs.
Advantages of Free Business Email:
✅ Cost: The biggest and most obvious advantage of free email is, well, that it’s free. Many now-successful companies were founded by people who had to make every single dollar count, and paid email was a luxury for them. Instead, they used the money saved on other critical areas of the business, such as marketing, product development, or inventory.
✅ Ease of setup: Anyone – even regular users – can create a new free email account in a few minutes, and most have done so several times in the past. This means there’s no need for technical expertise or IT support to give employees mail addresses – they can do it themselves.
✅ Familiarity: There are more than 4 billion email users worldwide, and most are using free email. As a result, a company that decides to use a free email service like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo, typically doesn’t need to give its employees nearly as much training on how to use it compared to a company that implements an expensive business-grade email solution.
Disadvantages of Free Business Email:
⛔️ Lack of professionalism: Most free email services (Zoho Mail is the only exception) don’t make it possible for users to take advantage of a custom domain name (like @yourcompanyname.com), forcing them to use a generic one (like @gmail.com) instead. The problem with generic domain names is that they lack professionalism. In fact, some potential customers and business partners may view them as downright untrustworthy, and spam filters may have the same opinion.
⛔️ Privacy issues: As we’ve already mentioned, free email providers often scan email content or analyze its metadata (data about data) for advertising purposes or to train AI models. Even if you don’t personally care about some big corporation having access to your business correspondence, your customers and partners might. They could view your choice of a free email service as a potential risk to their own u and data security.
⛔️ Compliance issues: Many companies are required by law to comply with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). Unfortunately, free mail services are fundamentally incompatible with these stringent compliance requirements.
⛔️ Limited control and customization: For email to be the most effective business communication tool it can be, it must be customized to your unique needs. Free email doesn’t let you do this – at least not to the same extent as paid email. A good example of this is spam filtering, which can be disabled in Google Workspace but not in regular Gmail.
⛔️ Distracting advertisements: There are free email services that are enjoyable to use, but some can be incredibly annoying because they display distracting ads to users directly in their mailboxes. One such free email service is Yahoo Mail. Ask yourself if you want your employees to be bombarded with ads ranging from online shopping deals to insurance offers, or if you would prefer a cleaner, more professional environment.
⛔️ No or limited customer support: When using free email services, the level of customer support provided is often minimal or entirely absent. An issue affecting free users might get fixed in an hour, or it might take a long time – there’s no guarantee because there’s no contractual obligation for prompt support. Even major players like Gmail suffer major outages from time to time, and smaller providers can be much worse in this regard.
Summary: Is Using Free Email for Business a Good Choice?
Given the pros and cons described above, we believe that using a free email for business is a good choice only if you’re just starting out and need email mostly for internal communication and building the foundations of your company. In these early stages, when every dollar counts and you’re focused on getting your business off the ground, free email can be a practical solution.
➡️ However, for everyone else, paid email is a far better choice.
Why are Paid Services the Better Choice?
Paid email services offer custom domain names, enhanced privacy and security, compliance with various regulations, better customization options, ad-free interfaces, dedicated customer support, and many other perks that make it worth the money.
How Should an Email for My Business Look Like?
After selecting a provider for your business email, we recommend you pay as much attention to the creation of your business email address as you pay to the selection of your paid email service:
A good business email address should be easy to remember, straightforward to spell, and clearly indicative of its intended purpose.
Individual employees can have addresses in a format like “john.doe@yourcompanyname.com”, and entire departments can share a common address like “support@yourcompanyname.com” or “sales@yourcompanyname.com”.
Migrate Your Emails to Your New (Free) Company Email:
Once you have come up with a professional email address (or addresses) and selected a provider, you can either create a new account(s) from scratch or use MailJerry to migrate your mailboxes in a few simple steps:
1) Download MailJerry or use the web app to start your data migration.
2) Select your old provider and enter your old email credentials.
3) Now select your new business email provider and enter the credentials as well.
4) Click on “Check Settings”, review your migration and click on “Start Migration”. MailJerry will handle everything else from here on.
