a scholarly & comparative survey of contemporary services for the conduct of correspondence by electronic post
/ɪˈlɛk.trɒn.ɪk meɪl/ · noun · also e-mail, email · derived from electronic + mail; in present sense from c. 1971
The transmission of written messages by electrical or electronic means has long antecedents in the telegraph and the teletype1. The modern form, in which a message is composed in a discrete envelope and conveyed across packet-switched networks, dates conventionally to the early nineteen-seventies, with the introduction of the at-sign convention by R. Tomlinson.
By the present year, four services, each operated by a distinct corporate proprietor, dominate consumer and professional usage in much of the English-speaking world. The principal subject of this entry, Outlook, is treated in § II; the three alternatives surveyed appear in § III.
The reader will note that several of the services described combine an application (the program with which one composes & reads messages) with a hosted mailbox (the account upon which messages are received & stored). The two are not always coterminous: Apple's Mail app, for instance, can be employed with mailboxes hosted by other providers, a fact noted in due course.
Outlook is the trade-name applied by the Microsoft Corporation to two related services: an email-and-calendar application, first issued with Microsoft Office 97 in the year 1997, and a free webmail service, first issued under the name Hotmail in 1996, acquired by Microsoft in 1997, and re-named Outlook.com in 20122.
The application is provided as part of the Microsoft 365 family of office software, which has reported in excess of 400 million paid seats worldwide, while the consumer webmail has been described as having a like order of active users. Personal subscriptions to Microsoft 365 begin at approximately $6.99 per month; business plans at approximately $6 per user per month.
The defining trait of Outlook, in distinction from the alternatives surveyed below, is its close integration with the wider Microsoft suite — the calendar, the address-book, the document programs (Word, Excel, &c.), and the conferencing tool Teams — by which means it is widely adopted within institutions whose work is organised around that suite.
The webmail and application service operated by the company Google (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc.). Issued in 2004, it presently reports approximately 1.8 billion active users, a figure widely cited as the largest among the services here considered.
Gmail is offered free of charge to consumers, with 15 GB of storage shared across the wider Google account; institutional plans, sold under the brand Google Workspace, begin at approximately $6 per user per month. The defining trait is its tight coupling with adjacent Google products — the Calendar, Drive (document storage), and Meet (conferencing).3
A webmail service founded in 2014 in Geneva, in the Swiss Confederation. Its operating company, Proton AG, is governed in association with a non-profit foundation. The service has reported, across the Proton family of products, in excess of 100 million accounts.
The defining trait of Proton Mail is its application of end-to-end encryption between Proton accounts, and what is termed zero-access encryption for messages stored upon its servers — by which the operating company itself is unable to read the contents of stored mail. Free accounts include 1 GB of storage; the entry paid plan, Mail Plus, begins at approximately $3.99 per month; the bundled plan, Proton Unlimited, at approximately $9.99 per month.4
The combination of (a) the Mail application, an email program supplied gratis with the macOS, iOS, & iPadOS operating-systems of the Apple Inc., in continuous succession since 2001; and (b) iCloud Mail, a hosted mailbox service issued in 2011, succeeding earlier services known as MobileMe, .Mac, and iTools.
An iCloud mailbox is provided gratis with any Apple ID, comprising 5 GB of storage; storage upgrades, sold under the heading iCloud+, begin at approximately $0.99 per month for fifty gigabytes. iCloud+ further provides such features as Hide My Email & the use of a custom domain. The Mail application itself, it should be noted, can be configured to read mailboxes hosted by other providers (Outlook.com & Gmail not excepted).5
| Particular | Outlook | Gmail | Proton Mail | Apple Mail / iCloud+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| year of issue | 1997 / 2012* | 2004 | 2014 | 2001 / 2011* |
| seat / user count | ≈ 400 M+ paid seats; ≈ 400 M+ consumer | ≈ 1.8 B+ active | ≈ 100 M+ accounts (Proton-wide) | tied to Apple ID base; not separately disclosed |
| proprietor | Microsoft Corp. | Google (Alphabet, Inc.) | Proton AG (non-profit affil.) | Apple, Inc. |
| place of origin | Redmond, WA, U.S.A. | Mountain View, CA, U.S.A. | Geneva, Switzerland | Cupertino, CA, U.S.A. |
| free admittance | yes (Outlook.com) | yes (15 GB shared) | yes (1 GB) | yes via Apple ID (5 GB) |
| paid entry | $6.99+ / mo (M365 Personal) | $6+ / user / mo (Workspace) | $3.99+ / mo (Mail Plus) | $0.99+ / mo (iCloud+ 50 GB) |
| defining trait | integrated office suite | web-first; large storage tiers | end-to-end & zero-access encryption | built-in to Apple devices; can read other mailboxes |
* indicates the year of the original product / the year of the present-day brand or hosted service.
This article is the work of an independent compiler & is neither sponsored nor endorsed by any of the named services. All trade-names & marks are the property of their respective proprietors.
Particulars are drawn from publicly stated information & should be read as approximate. Readers are encouraged to consult each provider's present-day site for current particulars.
Encyclopædia of the Digital Commons · Vol. XII · revised to MMXXVI · entry № 1374