Email was invented in 1971 — a lifetime ago in tech terms. Yet despite the rise in recent years of instant messengers, chat apps, and video meeting platforms, email clients continue to endure.
It’s not hard to understand why email remains one of the best choices for personal use or business use. Email is:
Easy. Email just feels intuitive. It takes only a moment to create a new message: fill out the To field, Subject field, and body, then hit Send. It’s simple enough for anyone, even the not-so-tech-savvy, to figure out.
Fast. Due to email messages’ small size, you can send and receive them in a flash. On illumy, emails get sent out at the same speed as on-net chats: 150 milliseconds.
Accessible. Unlike text messages that live only on your phone, email exists in the cloud (assuming your mail provider supports IMAP). That means wherever you have an internet connection, you can access your inbox.
Universal. An email message sent via one provider can be read on any other. Email’s long history means there are established protocols for message structure, sending, and receiving.
Email isn’t perfect. Because messages sent over the public internet can’t be encrypted, snoops could theoretically intercept your emails for their own gain. And scams abound — from phishing (impersonating a real person or business) to spoofing (making it look like a mail is from a different sender) to pharming (sending a link to a fraudulent site that looks legit).
But what if we told you some good news — that you can sign up for a free account with a secure email provider to protect your important messages and secure your personal information?
It’s possible with a free email address from illumy. Here’s what makes illumy one of the best free email services out there.
illumy makes it simple to create different addresses for different purposes.
Using different email addresses is one of the best things you can do to improve your security on the web.
New York Times tech columnist Brian X. Chen copped to this strategy in a recent story on email privacy.
“I try to take a cautious but moderate approach. I juggle four email accounts devoted to my main interests,” he wrote.
As Chen explains in the column, email is becoming a way for websites to gather more of your personal details — with a growing number of sites demanding your address before granting access to their content. It might seem innocuous, but the real objective is to track and target you … so you ultimately buy more stuff.
Multiple email “identities” can head this off by limiting what advertisers learn about you. Think about your digital activities, assign them into a few buckets, then create a email addresses accordingly.
Consider these examples:
Online shopping.
Using one address for online shopping can limit sellers from connecting your transactions across ecommerce sites — and keep you from being retargeted with ads for things you’ve already bought.
Banking.
You definitely want your banking activity to stay secret. Advertisers want nothing more than to learn about your credit cards or loans so as to triangulate your income.
Booking travel.
Over and above hiding your identity, masking your travel-booking behavior may result in better deals. Many booking companies will raise prices if they detect that you’ve made multiple visits to their site.
illumy protects your privacy better than the big guys.
Email’s usefulness notwithstanding, the email landscape is long overdue for a shakeup.
A handful of products — like a Google account, America Online account, and Yahoo! Mail account — dominate the market and provide many, if not most, of the country’s email addresses. This is a big problem — and not just from a competition perspective.
Profiling people is fundamental to these brands’ business model. In other words, if you have a Gmail account, AOL Mail account, or Microsoft Outlook account, these companies want to learn as much about you as possible so they can sell your data on or target you with ads themselves.
That means learning who you message and when. ID’ing what free service or browser you’re using. Scanning your message content. All of which activity is tied together and linked to your digital identity.
We think consumers deserve a better email platform. On illumy, your private content stays private. And the information we do collect, like analytics data, will never be used for targeting or sold to third parties.
It’s the perfect alternative to big corporate email.
illumy provides an encrypted option for sensitive info.
Because email isn’t encryptable, it’s smart to limit what you say and share in an email message.
That’s why industries like banking and medicine use private messaging platforms. Typically, when you get a message from your bank or doctor you’ll only be notified via email. You then have to log in to their platform to see what the message says.
For sensitive information in your personal communications, illumy provides the same kind of protected messaging. But! You don’t have to log in to a separate platform to see it.
That’s because illumy provides secure instant messaging in addition to competing with other email account providers. This on-net messaging, as we call it, stays completely on our servers and provides a much higher level of privacy than conventional emails can offer.
When you send messages on-net within illumy, you get useful features like:
Full end-to-end encryption.
That means your messages are hidden from spies, snoops, and sketchy actors. Even we can’t read them.
Presence.
You might know this feature from the desk phone at your office: it uses color-coded dots to show whether your contacts are available, away, or offline. Presence status automatically updates once per minute on both desktop clients and your mobile devices.
Really big group chats.
illumy supports large groups — like really large. You can add up to 1,000 illumy users to your on-net chats.
These extra features are just the start. illumy IM and email are designed to work together seamlessly. You get 2 GB of storage space to use across both tools. Conversations are arranged by recipient or group name, not message format. You can even mix and match illumy IMs and off-net emails within a single conversation thread (but do keep in mind that the emails won’t be encrypted).
We’re building illumy to be the best email provider on the market. A basic plan with illumy offers incredible ease of use in a super-speedy desktop mail app and mobile app. Soon we’ll offer a paid option too, with additional features like a phone number and unlimited calling.
If you want to see for yourself what makes illumy the world’s best free email account provider, just enter your email in the field at the top of this post to sign up for a free trial.
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.
