Leading internet giants Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo tightly ignore progress
It is hard to imagine that even in our time of high technology there are places which the progress can not reach. And if coming progress can theoretically reduce possible profit, it tends to be limited.
It’s known that most free email services exist on profits from advertising that is shown to users in the email account web interface. That is the reason why does internet giants of web-industry do not hurry to made the free access for e-mail by means of protocols POP3 and SMTP, because then the effects of their publicity will decrease, and they do not want that.Such giants as Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AOL.com operate many users, which are tied to other companies’ services don’t hasten to provide such access as today users won’t disappear and the reason is that they just get into the habit of using web-interface.
Of course, there are ways to avoid these limits. For example there are some Yahoo programs which convert web traffic into POP3. But this increases the possibility of password stealing with the help of that program, and that reduces the willing to use it. Hotmail has the ability provided by MSN.com to use special protocol integrated into Outlook Express and been unavailable to other e-mail software developers, and that is certainly also constrains the freedom of user when choosing e-mail software. The AOL has access by POP3 and SMTP, but it is accessible for the clients for internet access from that provider and this cramp the region of mail using because the internet access from the AOL.com is not everywhere.
However, they lose a lot, trying to follow the outdated marketing policy that is intended for online advertising, and limiting the user’s freedom in his choice. There is another way to monetize guests by attracting and keeping users. A company Google.com with its email Gmail.com has become this new model. Initially they provide users access to POP3 and SMTP interfaces not restricting user in methods of work with e-mail. 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 service format increasingly wins the sympathy of e-mail users as handy interface enables you to forget mail applications installation and setup problems.
As a result e-mail of the Future performs as web-interface without the use of mail applications. Yahoo.com, MSN.com and AOL.com most probably will also use this model later as it much profitable than out of date method of mail application utilization.POP3 and SMTP protocols are obsolete themselves. For instance, the Gmail.com provides new e-mails reception notifications via special RSS channel.