Free providers of email addresses are like sand to sea. In our comparison, we have selected the best five free email providers and tell you which free email providers you should choose for your start-up business.
The best free email providers: Outlook Live
The freemail provider Windows Outlook Live scores above all with large storage space, which is not least due to the free service Skydrive. Originally the service was called Hotmail.com – you can choose between outlook.com and hotmail.com as your email domain.
15 GB of free storage space and another 7 GB in the cloud via Skydrive.
E-Mail attachments up to 20 MByte, per online hard drive Skydrive up to 10 GByte.
A separate app for use on smartphones is available in the App Store.
The Microsoft chat service Skype is integrated directly in the Outlook mailbox.
POP3 and IMAP are free. Active Sync is available as an IMAP alternative.
The best free e-mail providers: T-Online E-Mail Basic
With T-Online’s free e-mail provider, you can attach larger attachments to your e-mails than your competitors. For this you have to live here with advertising, which is among other things also placed below your sent mails.
With 1 GB of solid free storage. About the cloud even a whopping 100 GB extra. But you pay 9.95 euros per month.
E-mail attachments up to 32 MB, reception even mails up to 50 MB.
You can access the e-mail provider via the homepage.
Free e-mail retrieval via POP3 and IMAP4.
The best free email providers: Gmail
The search engine giant and freemail provider Google has revolutionized the world of free email providers and catapulted them to the top of our free provider comparison:
E-mails are sorted and displayed more clearly in conversations. Overall, the Google Mail layout is very intuitive and can also be extensively personalized.
There is a dedicated iOS app and Android app, as well as the Gmail Notifier for Windows and Mac.
The normal memory is 15 GB. If you need more space, you can create a paid cloud account. The memory there is between 100 GB and 30 TB.
Free e-mail retrieval via POP3 and IMAP.
E-mail attachments up to 25 MB can be sent.
There is also an integrated telephony and chat feature via Gmail.
The best free email providers: GMX
The freemail offer from GMX has not grown in all respects to the competition:
GMX provides users of its free offer with a mailbox size of 1.5 GB. This is linked to a cloud storage of up to 8 GB.
With GMX you can send attachments of a maximum size of 20 MByte.
Especially in these areas, other providers such as Gmail or T-Online perform better. If you need more storage space, you can rely on the GMX Premium offer. Depending on the size, they either pay 2.99 euros or 4.99 euros per month.
In addition, GMX provides an easy-to-use and well-structured app for Android and iOS devices.
In terms of security, GMX offers its customers secure end-to-end encryption through the encryption concept Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). The GMX vault can also encrypt the cloud storage.
The best free e-mail providers: Web.de
The free service of Web.de provides a box of 1.5 GB for its users. In addition, there is a cloud storage of up to 8 GB in the free version.
With Web.de you can attach up to 20 MB of data to e-mails.
If you need more capacity, Web.de offers you the opportunity to join the so-called “Web.de Club”. For 5 euros a month you have unlimited storage capacity and the ability to send attachments of up to 100 MByte.
Web.de also offers a suitable client for the use of the service as an app on Android or iOS devices.
Just like Web.de, GMX also protects your e-mails with secure end-to-end encryption. The cloud storage can as with GMX, encrypt with the Web.de vault.
Ever since the global surveillance by the intelligence agencies became public, it is questionable how secure such services are in terms of privacy and data protection.
In addition, almost all free email providers earn money with personalized advertising: For this purpose, information from your private mail is evaluated in order to promote suitable products for you.
Therefore, in almost every case, you have to pay money if you want to use a secure e-mail provider that respects your private information. This is also confirmed by Stiftung Warentest’s current e-mail provider security test, which particularly recommends the providers Posteo and Mailbox.org, but does not recommend the free services.
