Let the Free Email Services Create Greater Value2021.05.28

The world’s first free email service was Hotmail.com, which was launched in July 1996. It was later acquired by Microsoft and became the current Outlook.com free email service. There are also Google’s Gmail.com, Yahoo yahoo.com, etc., all of which are currently free email services commonly used worldwide. The first free email service in China was 163.net launched by NetEase in November 1997. It is no exaggeration to say, every netizen has several free email accounts.

In West countries, due to the early development of the Internet and email service, email has become an Internet service that people cannot live without. However, in China, since email services have not been widely used, instant messaging (chat) services have developed rapidly due to their simplicity and ease of use, making instant messaging services almost replace email services, and people’s daily life and work email is rarely used in China. Only some large companies, some government agencies and universities still use email as their main work communication tool.

The author believes that the idleness of free email service resources invested and constructed in the early stages of Internet development in China is a huge waste of resources. It is not only a waste of investment in free email service providers, but also a waste in Internet users - not making good use of this free resources to improve the quality of life and protect personal online privacy. So, how to make full use of the free email service resources? This is the subject of this article.

At present, electronic invoices in China have basically been widely used, and the main way to receive electronic invoices is the user’s email account. There are also SMS to the user’s mobile phone to download the link of the e-invoice. But there is a charge for sending text messages. If the number of invoices is large, SMS is not cost-effective, so most businesses still choose to send e-invoice to the user's mailbox, which seems to have gradually become a must. Because businesses know that everyone that need the invoice should has at least one mailbox that bound to a mobile phone number, and basically all have QQ email addresses. This gives us a revelation, the application drives the use, in fact, the email is the best place to receive information and documents. This is why some big cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Guangzhou, etc. have allocated citizens’ email address free very early, hoping to provide citizens with a mobile "mailbox" that can receive all kinds of "letters" permanently, to replace the physical mailbox, because the physical mailbox cannot be used as a permanent mailbox due to the living move.

The above example is an example of re-playing the role of free email services. So, how to further play the role of free email services? Let us first re-recognize the advantages of email service.

The email system is a distributed and decentralized messaging communication system that truly covers all corners of the world. It is also the world’s largest and most popular Internet service infrastructure. Anyone can get free email address and email services at any time. And both free email services and paid services have achieved cloud email services with unlimited mailbox storage capacity.

Email peer-to-peer communication is a decentralized service that best protects user privacy. There is no need to rely on a centralized service, as long as you know the other party’s email address, you can communicate. For instant messaging (chat) and social networks, both parties must use the services provided by the same service provider to achieve communication. These services are a highly centralized and oligopolistic monopoly service. In the context of people's increasing demand for decentralization and privacy protection, the author believes that email will definitely play a greater role and bring more convenience and happiness to mankind.

To play the role of free email services, of course there is still room for improvement. For free email service providers, the current profit model is still advertising. This is a double-edged sword. There are too many advertisements and users are unwilling to use them; and without advertising, they cannot afford the actual cost of free use. Therefore, the current mode of operation can only be advertising. However, scanning user email content will cause email users to worry about privacy protection. Therefore, Google Gmail decided in June 2017 to no longer scan user email content, but it will still display relevant advertisements to email users through other methods.

So, for free email service providers, is there a better profit model? The answer is of course! Provide users with email encryption services to truly protect the security of confidential information in emails. If the information in the mailbox is encrypted and stored, who else would use free or paid online disks? The email encryption service can be a free service or a paid service, and both can have a profit model. Only when emails are fully encrypted, users can use free email services to store all kinds of confidential information with confidence, then users can't do without free email services. This will greatly enhance user stickiness, and there is no need to worry about finding profit models (including the charged encryption service). So, how to realize fully automatic email encryption? You only need to recommend users to use MeSign App There are free edition and charged edition services, and there is a ready-made profit model that allows idle resources to bring new profit growth points.

As for free email service users, everyone knows that not only is the chat system unable to store messages as complete and long-term as the email service, but also has privacy protection issues. People still need to express their emotions completely by writing letters. What should we do? Writing encrypted emails is the most ideal way of emotional communication with a privacy protection level equivalent to that of traditional paper letters and has the advantage of being able to store for a long time and can be read at any time compared to paper letters. The advantage of encrypted emails is that you can send encrypted emails to the mailbox for permanent storage of all important confidential information (such as all account passwords), which is more reliable than saving on a network disk!

We call on everyone to use less chat services and social media to communicate, use encrypted emails to communicate with their closest relatives, and truly write an encrypted email to parents or children so that the other party can treasure it forever. So, how to send encrypted emails? Please use MeSign App as email client to set up your free email account to send encrypted emails automatically. It is impossible for free email service providers to read your email content and place advertisements. Act now by yourself to protect your privacy.

For e-government systems and all Internet service providers, such as electronic invoice service providers, electronic invoices should be sent via encrypted emails because the invoice contains important financial data. The business system for sending cleartext email just need a small change, calling MeSign E-mail API to get the user's public key before sending an email, which is a free service, then the system can send the encrypted email to the users. Only in this way can we really protect confidential information security in the e-government service outcome emails, protect the valuable user resources of Internet service providers and protect users' confidential information security.

In short, the global Internet free email service resources are a valuable resource, we should make full use of this resource, all parties work hard, everyone uses encrypted emails. Only in this way can we fully utilize the free email service resources to create new value for Internet users and Internet companies, play a greater role, and make contributions to mankind happiness and safety.