One of the key decisions you need to make when starting, or even scaling, a company is which mailer to use. Choosing the best mail distributor will not only ensure optimal and effective internal communication, but will also allow you to communicate easily with your service customers. There are many business email plans, but the first decision you should make is whether or not you should pay for the service. In this article, we're going to go over a selection of paid and free plans from the top email providers Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and ProtonMail, giving you all the information you need to decide if that extra expense might work for your business. When comparing the free and paid plans, we've combined the cost and features sections of this article.
Google's Gmail is an industry leader (Image credit: Google)
Features
Gmail's free service is an industry leader, and for good reason. Not only does it come with a healthy 30 GB of storage, but you can also manage other email accounts from your Gmail interface and easily filter messages into categories for reference. Gmail's paid option, G Suite, starts at €1 per user and, apart from 1GB of space in the most basic plan, includes a guaranteed uptime of 3.19%, adapted mail, a shared calendar, applications from Google etc G Suite is a great option for companies that want to keep all documentation and correspondence in one place. Though now dwarfed by Gmail, Outlook has been an essential mail delivery service for decades. Its free service includes fifteen GB of mailbox storage, automatic recognition of essential emails, and apps for helpful services like Yelp, Evernote, and Paypal. Office 500, Outlook's paid service, starts at $150 a month and also includes ad removal, a massive 8GB inbox that could come in handy as your business grows, XNUMX Terabytes of OneDrive storage, work offline and the Microsoft Office suite. It may have been forgotten a bit, but Yahoo Mail still offers users an absolutely free email service that can compete with other essential mailers. Yahoo Mail's free plan includes XNUMX Terabytes of bulk storage, privacy-focused one-time email addresses, Facebook, SMS, POP and IMAP integration, and more. Like other providers, Yahoo Mail lets you connect a personalized email address to your work domain and includes a shared calendar and other easy-to-use features. You don't get the smart office tools that Gmail and Outlook offer, but the plans start at just $XNUMX per user per month when billed annually. Although the free plans outlined above are relatively generous, if they lack company-specific features, the free version of Proton Mail has a storage limit of just XNUMXMB, which is insufficient for even the smallest startup. This small allowance, along with a limit of XNUMX messages per day, reflects the fact that ProtonMail does not present itself as a large-scale provider but as a service dedicated to user security. To get anything close to the paid plans offered by your competitors, you should go for ProtonMail's professional plan at a hefty price of €XNUMX per month per user. It includes advanced security features such as end-to-end encryption, self-destructing messages, full anonymity, and a secure SSL connection. However, we would only recommend this plan for users who are particularly concerned about email security.
Yahoo Mail has been running since 1997 (Image credit: Yahoo)
When it came to interface, organizational tabs and tools, and compatibility with other email vendors or third-party apps, there was little difference between our providers' free and paid services. Gmail and Outlook, in particular, have a well-organized and easy-to-navigate email interface that makes it easy for business owners to run and manage email. However, the additional features offered with paid plans from all providers give business owners much more power and performance. Gmail and Outlook are part of Gsuite and Office 365 respectively, and both software packages include powerful office tools with applications across your business. However, neither Yahoo Mail nor ProtonMail come with a suite of office tools. That said, Yahoo Mail's paid plans allow you to manage all your mailboxes on one screen and access analytics tools so you can better understand and optimize the role of email in your business. When it comes to performance, ProtonMail is best seen as a plugin to your existing email provider and can be integrated with a third-party client that supports IMAP and SMTP, such as Outlook. It provides additional security for confidential correspondence through end-to-end encryption and other advanced techniques.
ProtonMail is all about security (Image credit: ProtonMail)
Support
Support is generally much better with paid email plans. Gmail promises 24/7 phone support to its G Suite customers. However, free Gmail users should visit the Help Center or Community Channel. Outlook provides phone support or instant chat support to its paid email users, while Yahoo Mail's help desk services are prioritized for paying customers. Meanwhile, ProtonMail offers multi-user support to its business plan subscribers. If not, there is a basic FAQ section on their website.
Microsoft Outlook is easy to navigate (Image credit: Microsoft)
Verdict
While the best free email service providers offer more than enough storage, compatibility, and organization tools for a personal email account, they are not designed for multiple users. For a minimal cost, paid email providers can seriously help organize your team's correspondence and allow you to easily share documents. Additionally, the ability to connect custom email addresses to your domain gives your business a more professional feel and, especially during an awareness campaign, can make the difference between a sale and a flop.
What is ARC and why is it important to DMARC?
By: Peter Goldstein, CTO and Co-Founder of Valimail Domain-based message authentication, reporting and compliance (DMARC) is considered the gold standard for protection against domain spoofing (also known as domain spoofing). exact). However, there is a small percentage of messages (less than 1%) that, due to the way they are routed through intermediaries such as mailing lists, mail gateways, and other message modification filters, can cause problems for DMARC. This is where ARC comes into play. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) are the authentication protocols that support DMARC. For a message to pass DMARC validation, it must first be authenticated via SPF or DKIM. Messages pass SPF checks when they arrive from a server that is listed as authoritative by the domain owner. For DKIM, the message must arrive unaltered after being cryptographically signed by the domain that is responsible for the message. SPF and DKIM are designed to work best for direct mail flows, where messages pass from the source host to the destination host with no hops between them. Both are subject to frequent interruptions when passing through intermediate hosts, such as forwarders, mailing list servers, or secure email gateways. SPF failures in these cases usually occur because the intermediate server is not listed as authoritative by the domain owner. With DKIM, failures most often occur when the message is modified by the broker, such as when a forwarder adds a footer to each message. These flaws present challenges for domain owners publishing DMARC records. Fortunately, the Authenticated Receipt Chain (ARC) has emerged to address these challenges. ARC provides an authenticated "chain of custody" for a message, allowing each entity handling the message to see who has already processed it, what the authentication score was at each stage of mail processing, and add their own processing information. and evaluation to a message. With the CRA in place, mail recipients like Gmail or Yahoo Mail can make more informed delivery decisions about mail that has taken an indirect path to its destination. Plus important encore, étant donné que la prize en charge d'ARC provient des destinataires et des gestionnaires de courier, les propriétaires de domaine déployant DMARC lors de l'application bénéficiont des avantages de l'ARC sans qu'aucune action supplémentaire ne soit requise On your part. The bottom line: DMARC and ARC together provide the most comprehensive solution for securing domains against spoofing and ensuring reliable message delivery.