It is hard to imagine that even in our time of high technology there are places which the progress can not reach. Moreover, the more this progress can reduce possible profit, the longer time they are restraining it by all available means.
Most free e-mail services are known to get profit from ads showed to users in mailbox web-interface. That’s why the Internet web giants of web industry are not in a hurry to give a free access to mailboxes through the POP3 and SMTP protocols. No doubt they wouldn’t want the effectiveness of their advertising to be reduced greatly.Such giants as www.Yahoo.com, www.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 cause there are some ways to avoid these limitations. For instance there is third parties’ software for Yahoo.com converting 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.com 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. AOL.com has an access through POP3 and SMTP, but it is available for users to have an access to the Internet only from that provider. That also limits the opportunities of using an email, because there are places without an access to the Internet from AOL.com.
Still they loose a lot when trying to follow out of date marketing policy directed to online-advertising constraining user’s freedom of choice. There is another way to monetize population attracting and holding users. Such new model of user treatment was Google.com Company and its e-mail service – Gmail.com. Users have the access to POP3 and SMTP interfaces, which does not limit the user’s opportunities to work with the email. Furthermore the service has a great advantage over ordinary email clients like Outlook Express; this is a huge size of the mailbox. All letters are free stored on the server, which allows the user to get the access to his mailbox from each point of the world easily.Plus, only relevant advertising is shown to a user, no bothering banners! This format is becoming more and more likable for email users because a convenient web interface allows you to forget about installing and setting problems of email programs.
As a result the email systems we will know in the future will be web interfaces, without actually using any email programs. Most probably Yahoo.com, MSN.com and AOL.com will use this model in the future, because such approach better than the old methodic with the using of mail programs.Basically POP3 and SMTP become even obsolete; the Gmail.com provides new e-mails reception notifications via RSS channels.