Since launching 20 years ago, Gmail has not only become one of Google’s flagship products, but the go-to email client for netizens in both the consumer and enterprise spheres. 

Gmail’s launch was initially greeted as an April Fools joke, something founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had become somewhat renowned for in Silicon Valley. 

But unlike previous pranks, this was no joke, and the email client went on to become hot property due to its restricted availability on launch and market-leading storage capacity.

Gmail launched with an eye-watering (for the time) 1GB of storage space, which dwarfed the options offered by competing solutions, allowing users to store thousands of emails, rather than mere hundreds other clients could muster.

Paltry storage offerings such as these appear laughable in 2024, but for its time this was groundbreaking. Just a year later, Gmail cemented its credentials as a major player in the email space by doubling the storage capacity offered to normal accounts to 2GB. 

Georges Harik, product management director for Gmail, stated at the time that Google would “keep giving people more space forever”, and the search giant stayed true to its word over the the next decade or so -Gmail continued to increase its storage up to 15GB per user with the introduction of other Google services such as Drive and Photos.

Eventually, in 2018 Google launched its consumer subscription service Google One, which allowed users to pay for additional storage above the 15GB free allocation, up to 2TB.

Gmail search options were a step change for users

Another key feature that set Gmail apart from the rest of the field was its market-leading search capabilities. Alongside its expanded storage capacity, Gmail was paired with Google’s search expertise to bring enhanced search functionality to its email client. 

This gave users the ability to efficiently organize and find specific emails from the thousands of messages the client could now store with its bolstered storage offering. Google placed its bets on user convenience as a key differentiator early on, and it certainly worked. 

The email client’s rise to prominence has been nothing short of remarkable over its 20 year life span. In a fiercely competitive market space, Google battled its way into a strong position alongside other industry giants such as Apple and Microsoft. 

Gmail now boasts an estimated 1.2 billion users, meaning roughly one-in-seven people around the world are using the service as their preferred email client.

As it stands, Gmail is the second most popular email client, according to research by email marketing platform Litmus. Calculated using responses from over 1.3 billion opens on Litmus Email Analytics in February 2024, Gmail had a 31.16% market share, with Apple taking the top spot with 55.64%.

The cornerstone of Google’s Workspace suite

As well as being the default email client for a large swathe of private individuals, Gmail forms a core part of Google’s Workspace suite alongside its Meet and Docs products.

Google Workspace was first introduced as Gmail for Your Domain in February 2016, and the service was quickly renamed Apps for Your Domain the same year. 

In 2016 Google changed the name once more, settling on G Suite, before going through a final rebrand and unveiling the Workspace name in 2020. The tech giant has previous with rebranding - and scrapping - product ranges, and this was no different. 

As recently as 2024 the company has embarked on a major rebranding, with the company’s new flagship AI offerings renamed under the Gemini banner.

Google said it had over 3 billion users in December 2022, of which 8 million were paying customers. The firm told Business Insider this had increased to nine million in mid-2023.

Gmail in the AI era

Gmail has received a raft of new features in recent years, with AI being at the forefront of the innovations the search giant has made to its email system. Users can now use AI to write emails using the ‘Help me write’ tool, for example

This feature uses LLMs to generate draft emails based on prompts provided by the user, which can then be refined depending on the user’s needs.

Gmail also offers a Smart Compose feature that uses a hybrid language generation model to offer word suggestions – in English, Spanish, French, and Italian, that users can accept or reject using the tab button. 

Information-heavy emails, such as restaurant reservations or flight tickets, are processed with machine learning to generate summary cards to provide the essential details in the message at a glance.

These summary cards also prompt the user to add events to their Google Calendar, also enabling the reader to quickly look at their availability without having to leave their email client.

Another recent addition to Gmail is its Nudging feature that reminds users to respond to messages they may have missed. The first Gmail AI feature that runs on both sent and received emails, users will get a prompt to reply or follow up on various messages that have not had a response after a few days.

Two decades on from its initial unveiling, Gmail is still going strong and remains one of the most popular email clients around the world today. Gmail’s existence was (for a time) called into question amid speculation that the tech giant was sunsetting the service, however. 

In February, a fake email circulated online sent users into a frenzy over fears that it planned to shut down the service. Google was quick to reassure users that Gmail is “here to stay” for the foreseeable future.

The internet is a merciless engine of progress, and I don’t always think that’s a good thing. Take the Mozilla Foundation. Turning out internet software tools since the early days, it is now, according to statistic addicts, almost consigned to history when it comes to market share for its famous Firefox browser. 

But there’s also Thunderbird, a cross-platform email client application that’s actually usable. This has recently been reworked with version 115, codenamed Supernova, and its changes are worth some attention.

We live in an era of cloud-resident email accounts. Actually, if you want to be pedantic about it, that description is nonsense.

Cloud scales up and down as your demand for computing varies, driven by your business and your customers. 

When did you last ring up Hotmail and say “deliver a bit faster”, or demand the right to migrate your online presence from one cloud hosting region to another? Not even Amazon’s (otherwise excellent) business email hosting service gives you one iota of the controllability that cloud hosters take for granted.

This cuts little ice with the type of user who throws ‘cloud’ around with abandon. The classic cloud-obsessed, intolerant user considers local expertise to be the kind of dinosaur they can do without, the moment they switch to the cloud. The problem for them is, thanks to COVID-19, we have all been through a global phenomenon that showed us exactly what happens when bureaucrats design a system using modern tools.

Investing in a solid local database

What does this have to do with Thunderbird? Very simply, it’s all about the uses and upkeep of a local database. Cloud systems assume there will always be a connection to the cloud, and that any database services are handled in a megascale, highly optimized fashion. 

What I found was that while pandemic systems (viral detection tests, vaccination records etc) were demanded locally, and held centrally, there was no plan B: if you were denied access, then even local copies of PDFs on Android phones wouldn’t open. Ironically, that’s because the bureaucrats used the PDF format to limit the lifetime of the certificates they graciously allowed me to download, and the lifetime, even opened locally, demanded a cloud connection to be checked and permitted.

All of the crises I’ve seen in the last few years have, as an apparent side effect, included loss of access to the cloud. Whether it’s queueing for the passport check at Calais Eurostar, or sitting in huge traffic snarl-ups in California, the sign that you are in real trouble is that your cloud-resident services go down. 

These experiences have made me much more interested in being able to have a local, portable repository of messages and documents, which doesn’t depend on the cloud. Enter Thunderbird. I want to be able to show officials everything I need to satisfy their enquiries without necessarily having a trusted link. 

I know that Thunderbird isn’t alone. In particular, Yahoo has relaunched and rethought its local email app. I particularly like its take on the process of handling attachments, although I haven’t done enough testing to report on whether this is an entirely local process. 

But I do think the use of email has now expanded so much that the assumptions about cloud storage and “reasonable” data sizes have had to be almost completely discarded. One of my customers has a 17GB Outlook data file: so big, I can’t summon up the courage to do battle with it, at least not on his old workstation PC. Even equipped with all the utilities and knowledge on offer at Slipstick, I am wary of tangling with scattered, age-old lists of vital messages interspersed with the jagged remains of deleted junk emails.

Despite my several decades of VBA experience, the state of Outlook local data isn’t something I’m inclined to dabble in. There are far too many ifs, buts, ohs, and oughtas in the readme files to reassure me that I’m taking a safe and reversible course of action with what is often a business’s most important data repository.

Why Thunderbird Supernova is winning me over

Thunderbird has no such qualms. It will go through a compaction exercise on an email folder with a right-mouse click. Zap! All that space left by deleted messages is gone. This might be for bad reasons: maybe Mozilla finds modern laptop or tablet disk volumes too miserly for the safe storage of vital messages in larger quantities, or perhaps it’s just too difficult to break the Outlook hegemony. But at least it tried. 

I now run an ancient but very lovable ThinkPad Tablet 2 with an LTE modem and Windows 10 as my email viewer and repository. Slightly fiddly with my pinky finger as scrolling and selection stylus, but far better than staring at various hula-hoops and beachballs while waiting for cloud access to reappear. Normally with a downright angry queue of holidaymakers behind me, at the airport or ferry terminal.

I expect to have two types of heckling at this news, neither of which I actually disagree with. The first is those who point out that we have been here before, with mail databases dating back to Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and many more. I can remember a certain frisson of shock at discovering that IceWarp could be set up to use a SQL Server for email message storage. Yes, various efforts to use databases for emails have been tried for decades. But I can report that if you hit an email database with a quarter of a million messages then you can quite easily break it: these days, a quarter of a million messages would be one nuclear family’s mail archive.

The second heckle is that nobody uses email anymore! This is one of those things that seems to follow the sunspot cycle, with eras of low activity followed up by eras of massive outbursts of change. After all, wasn’t Slack meant to replace email? I believe that email has found a new role: not as the main or even the first means of communication, but rather as the repository of information. It’s the place where all those horrible “follow-up copies” get sent, along with legal notices: stuff you aren’t gagging to read, but which it’s handy to be able to look back on, once the dust settles and the camera live stream LEDs go dim. 

This demands a well-designed, extremely robust, and recoverable database. Something I am pinning my hopes on Mozilla being able to deliver.

Looking for the best email provider in 2022, Zoho Mail is a top contender. This business-oriented email client offers affordable plan options and integrates seamlessly with the wider Zoho productivity suite. It also comes with a range of tools for organization and collaboration, including an internal message board, calendar, and note and task apps.

So, is this the right email client for your business? In our Zoho Mail review, we’ll cover everything you need to know about this email service.

Pricing and plans

Zoho Mail is free to use for up to five users, and each user receives 5GB of storage space. You can use your own domain for your email addresses, but you cannot set up POP or IMAP functionality to forward your mail to another email client.

The Mail Lite plan is Zoho Mail’s most affordable paid option. It costs 80p per user per month for 5GB of storage per user, or £1 per user per month for 10GB of storage per user. With Mail Lite, you can set up multiple email domains, forward your mail, and access collaboration tools like calendars and streams. You can also send attachments of up to 250MB in size.

The Mail Premium plan costs £3.20 per user per month. The main reasons to upgrade are that it offers 50GB of storage space per user, and email attachments of up to 1GB in size. It also enables you to back up users’ emails to a central server and to configure the Zoho Mail client with your company’s branding.

Zoho Mail is also available as part of Zoho Workplace, a productivity suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet software, a video conferencing platform, and more. Zoho Workplace starts at £2.40 per user per month, with 30GB of storage per user.

Features

Zoho Mail includes all the basic features you’d expect to find in a business email client. Notably, you can set up multiple email addresses at one or more domains, which is helpful if your business has several departments that each need their own email addresses.

One of our favorite things about Zoho Mail is the quality of folders and incoming email filters that this email client offers. Each user can create an unlimited number of folders and nest them within existing folders for greater organization. In addition, each folder can be archived at any time, so it’s easy to instantly archive all emails related to a specific project once it’s completed.

Filters make it easy to use these flexible folders to organize your work. You can set these up for incoming or outgoing emails, and route emails into folders based on who they’re to or from, keywords in the subject or body, and even the type of attachment included. There’s no limit to how many filters you can have, and each filter can be defined by multiple conditions.

Among the more unique aspects is the streams feature. Instead of emailing back and forth with coworkers about an incoming email, streams enables you to simply create an instant messaging thread. You can tag coworkers in the messages, so only people who need to be involved with the thread need to be notified about it.

Streams is extremely useful for collaborating, especially when you need feedback from multiple people before responding to an email. In addition, we like that it puts a flexible barrier between internal discussions and your inbox, so that you’re not dealing with ever-lengthening email chains.

Interface and in use

Zoho Mail offers a web client and mobile apps for iOS and Android. We thought that both the web and mobile apps were easy to use, but we especially liked the web experience. The service uses a system of tabs, similar to a browser. So, you can have your inbox open in one tab, an email draft in another, and your calendar in a third.

Zoho Mail’s search function also deserves special mention. The search feature is designed in such a way that you can do a quick search for a keyword across the platform, or you can search specifically through your mail, notes, calendar, contacts, or attachments. In addition, the search has a huge range of built-in filters, making it easy to home in on the exact information you’re looking for.

Support

Zoho Mail offers 24/7 phone and email support for paid users, but only email support for free users. The platform also has a very extensive online knowledgebase that’s packed with tutorials and screenshots to help guide you through the service’s features.

Security

Zoho Mail is highly secure and complies with a number of industry-leading standards, such as ISO 27001 (Information Security Management) and ISO 27017 (Security Controls for Cloud Services). All emails are encrypted with TLS (transport layer security), both at rest on Zoho’s servers and when being sent to another email provider’s servers.

In addition, Zoho Mail helps secure users’ accounts with features like two-factor authentication, which requires you to have your smartphone in addition to your password to sign in. IT administrators can configure this email client with single sign-on, and have access to internal auditing tools to track who is accessing what email addresses and when.

The competition

Zoho Mail emphasizes collaboration and organization while offering plans that are as affordable as possible. However, it might not be the best value if you need a lot of storage space, as standard plans are capped at 50GB per user.

By contrast, Google Workspace offers up to 5TB per user with a Business Plus plan. At £13.80 per user a month, this is a much pricier option than Zoho Mail, but it also includes a suite of productivity apps.

Verdict

Zoho Mail is one of the most affordable and versatile email clients for businesses of all sizes. This platform gives employees the freedom to customize how their email is organized and uses collaboration tools like streams to minimize inbox clutter. In addition, its web client uses a tabbed layout that’s extremely user-friendly.

The only significant downside we see is that storage is capped at 50GB per user. However, this is relatively easy for most organizations to deal with. Overall, we think Zoho Mail is one of the best email clients for business.

Further reading

For more information on getting the most productivity out of your email communications, check out our best email clients guide. Or, if you’re not a Gmail or iOS user and want to know about your options, you might like this best email client on Windows guide.

If you conduct sensitive business by email, you need a messaging service with security you can trust. Enter Switzerland-based ProtonMail, which offers end-to-end encryption, self-destructing messages, and a server vault buried hundreds of feet underground. Although this email client is highly secure, it’s also easy to use, and includes features like spam filters and customizable folders.

In our ProtonMail review, we’ll cover everything you need to know to decide if it’s right for you, and see if it can join the ranks of the best email providers.

Pricing and plans

ProtonMail offers three plans for individuals and three plans for businesses.

A free ProtonMail account enables you to set up a single email address, and gives you 1GB of storage, with a sending limit of 150 emails per day.

The Mail Plus account costs £3.41 a month and includes 15GB of storage, support for up to 10 email addresses, one custom email domain, and unlimited folders, labels, filters, and messages. This plan also includes priority support and the Proton Calendar product.

An Unlimited account costs £8.53 a month and comes with 500GB of storage and 15 email addresses. It also enables you to send encrypted messages to non-ProtonMail recipients, and to use three custom email domains, and includes unlimited folders, messages, labels, and filters, alongside priority support and the Proton Calendar, Drive, and VPN products.

Of the three business plans, Mail Essentials costs £5.97 per user a month. Each user receives 15GB of storage, while you get 10 email addresses per user, unlimited folders, labels, and filters, and suppoort for three custom email domains alongside contact groups management and Proton Calendar.

The Business plan, at £9.39 per user a month, offers 500GB of storage and 15 email addresses per user, alongside unlimited folders, labels, and filters as well as support for 10 custom email domains plus contact groups management. It also includes the Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, and Proton VPN services. An enterprise plan is available on request.

Features

ProtonMail was built to be one of the most secure email clients on the market. This service uses end-to-end encryption, which means that messages are encrypted on your computer before they’re ever sent. That also means that not even the folks at ProtonMail can read your messages, let alone a hacker peeking in on your connection.

Notably, ProtonMail even enables you to use end-to-end encryption when you’re sending messages to someone who uses a different email client. You can also turn on PGP (pretty good privacy) encryption with a single click, and this security measure is automatically applied to incoming emails to keep them safe from prying eyes.

For the most sensitive information, ProtonMail even has a self-destruct feature. You can set a timer in hours, days, or weeks, and the message will disappear from ProtonMail’s servers after the allotted time expires. Keep in mind, though, that this doesn’t prevent recipients from saving a copy of a message offline.

Of course, there’s more to ProtonMail than just security. The email client also offers good tools to help you organize your messages, including customizable folders and color-coded labels. It also enables you to create multiple email addresses for use with your account, and to create a custom domain for your email addresses.

There’s also a built-in calendar app, which looks and feels a lot like Google Calendar. You can create recurring events, set up notifications, and color-code your calendars to stay organized.

ProtonMail has built-in spam filters, which we appreciated. Spam does occasionally get through, but you can easily blacklist email addresses (and whitelist addresses you don’t want auto-blocked). The client also has customizable filters, which you can use to designate emails as spam based on the sender’s domain or the email’s subject line.

Interface and in use

ProtonMail offers an email client for the web as well as mobile apps for iOS and Android devices. The web client will look very familiar if you’ve used Gmail before. You can select multiple messages and drag them into folders, star messages to highlight them in your inbox, and access drafts, sent mail, and folders from a sidebar menu.

The mobile app is just as simple. The compose button is always accessible from your inbox, which we liked, and it’s easy to switch between your inbox and other folders using a hamburger menu.

One thing we especially liked about ProtonMail was the process of encrypting emails for non-ProtonMail recipients. You need to set a password for the recipient to access your message, and you can do this from inside the email composer. You can even set a hint in case they may have forgotten the password.

The only feature that we took issue with in ProtonMail was the search function, which isn’t always great at finding messages. The keyword search doesn’t autocomplete based on recent emails, and we found that when you don’t use an exact keyword match, the results can be hit or miss.

If you don’t like the ProtonMail email client, you can also use the ProtonMail Bridge app. This configures your account for clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, and Apple Mail without compromising ProtonMail’s encryption. Setting up the Bridge app only takes a few minutes, and you almost never need to go back into ProtonMail once it’s done.

Support

ProtonMail offers support by email only. You can either send an email using ProtonMail or fill out a request form that’s sent through Zendesk. Free users can expect a response in around 24 hours, while paid users typically receive responses within a few hours.

The company also has an online knowledge base that covers most of ProtonMail’s features. The knowledgebase is fully searchable, and most articles have annotated screenshots to help you troubleshoot.

Security

On top of the many security features already mentioned in this ProtonMail review, the company also offers two-factor authentication to protect your account. This requires you to have your smartphone available to log in to the email client, and makes it much harder for someone to access your emails even if they steal your password.

Another perk is that you can sign up for an account anonymously. You’re given the option to enter your current email address as a recovery email, but you don’t have to. Just note that if you don’t enter a recovery email, you won’t be able to access your account if you ever lose your password.

The competition

ProtonMail is one of the only email providers that offers end-to-end encryption for messages sent to recipients using another email client. However, most email clients, including Gmail and Outlook, offer TLS (transport layer security) encryption. TLS encryption has never been hacked, so it’s arguably just as secure for most purposes.

If you are willing to rely on TLS encryption instead of end-to-end encryption, both Gmail and Outlook offer 15GB of storage space for free and don’t have daily sending limits. ProtonMail’s web client is almost identical to Gmail, but doesn’t integrate with a variety of productivity apps like Gmail does.

Verdict

ProtonMail goes above and beyond when it comes to security. This email client offers end-to-end encryption for all your messages, even when they’re sent to non-ProtonMail users. In addition, it enables you to set an expiration timer on messages and to register for an account anonymously.

That said, ProtonMail is pricey. So, this email client is best if you’re routinely sending highly sensitive information, and are willing to pay a premium for Swiss security.

Further reading

For more information on getting the most productivity out of your email communications, check out our best email clients guide. Or, if you’re not a Gmail or iOS user and want to know about your options, you might like this best email client on Windows guide.

Superhuman is an exclusive email client that requires a paid subscription. In this Superhuman email review, you’ll learn what makes the app unique and whether the paid subscription is worth the money.

Superhuman review: Snapshot

Superhuman is a highly exclusive email client that is only available for Gmail users on macOS and iOS devices. While you can be invited into the app by an existing user, those who don’t meet the device and operating system requirements will be placed on a waitlist.

The main draw of Superhuman is an individual focus on handling your emails more efficiently. But due to its focus on individual productivity and restriction to Gmail and Apple users, the app isn’t well suited for a wider team. If you use your email relatively sparsely, the subscription is also unlikely to be worth it.

While the $30/month subscription fee may seem extravagant, Superhuman offers impressive email management functionality. With automatic AI-based email prioritization, a specific system of keyboard shortcuts, and offline functionality, it will certainly help you increase your productivity.

Score: 4/5

Read on for our full and detailed review.

Superhuman’s competitors

Superhuman: Key features

Superhuman primarily offers speed and productivity. It’s essentially a wrapper for Gmail with some added features to enhance the efficiency of your email management.

One of the standout features of Superhuman is the simple visual design. The app is built to be visually pleasing and simple to digest. This is a welcome change from the busy and cluttered nature of many email interfaces.

Superhuman is also built for speed. The provider specifically created Superhuman with the 100-millisecond rule in mind. This rule states that every interaction between the user and the app should take no longer than 100 milliseconds because this is the threshold for instantaneous response. So whether you’re opening the app, searching for an email, or hitting send, the action is essentially immediate.

Another feature of Superhuman is the extensive built-in keyboard shortcuts. Every single action has a keyboard shortcut programmed to execute it. Superhuman has built this functionality to speed up the time spent writing and managing emails. However, these shortcuts have to be used to operate the app. So there is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to Superhuman, although there is a helpful pop-up search bar available if you forget any of them.

One of the greatest barriers to email productivity is sorting through piles of unanswered emails. With this in mind, Superhuman leverages AI technology to automatically sort your emails. The algorithm quickly learns which emails are most urgent and bumps them to the top. You can also create a VIP list to segment specific senders into a separate list.

Another highlight of Superhuman is the ability to unsend emails. Whether because of a typo, forgetting an attachment, or sending an email to the wrong person, users can easily recall an email after it has been sent through Superhuman. If you have sent an email and you’re anxious about getting a fast response, Superhuman also provides read receipts so you’ll know when the recipient has opened your message.

Superhuman: What’s new in 2022?

Back in December 2020 Superhuman unveiled a new command tool that gives users the ability to quickly find and execute shortcuts, and thus take advantage of features they may not have known how to use. It can be accessed with a simple double finger tap and significantly shortens the learning curve associated with the program.

Users can see if a recipient has opened their emails through read receipts. Previously, you could also see a timestamp and the location of your email recipient when they opened your email. This feature caused a lot of negative publicity over privacy concerns, even among existing Superhuman users. So, since 2019, the email open timestamp and location tracking have been disabled. Read receipts are also opt-in rather than enabled by default.

Superhuman: Pricing

Superhuman costs a flat £24 a month. Payments are made on a recurring subscription basis and you must enter debit or credit card information or use Google Pay. All of this has to be entered when you begin the onboarding process. There is no free plan or free trial available for Superhuman.

After the onboarding questionnaire, you’ll be brought to a payment screen to enter your card information. Only then will you be able to reserve a spot for your onboarding call so a rep can talk you through the best way to use Superhuman and show you how to use the app most effectively.

Testing Superhuman

Superhuman has uniquely marketed itself as an exclusive email client. It even has a waiting list of customers waiting to be accepted into the app. With this in mind, we decided to test how challenging it is to be accepted and onboarded onto Superhuman.

How challenging is the onboarding process for Superhuman?

Part of the appeal for Superhuman users is its exclusivity. You can’t just sign up—you have to either be invited by an existing user or sign up through the website. Then, you’ll be taken through an extensive questionnaire and personalized onboarding call to ensure you’re the right type of customer for the product.

While the website has several Get Started calls to action, you won’t be able to do so until your onboarding call is complete. You can also download the desktop app directly from the website (as long as you’re a Mac user), but similarly, it cannot be activated until after your onboarding call.

The first step is to fill out a six-minute questionnaire. Questions include the operating systems and email provider you use, and whether you have any apps currently integrated into your existing Gmail account. If you’re not a Gmail user or a Mac user, the questionnaire automatically ends with instructions to check your inbox. There, you’ll find an email explaining that Superhuman cannot cater to your needs at this time but that you’ll be added to their waitlist and notified when a version of the product that works for your needs is available.

If you get through the questionnaire, you’ll be redirected to a page with instructions to enter credit card details and book your onboarding call slot. The onboarding call takes about 30 minutes and is essentially a training call. The rep will talk you through using the app and how all the keyboard shortcuts work. The goal is to make sure you’re using Superhuman optimally so you get the most out of the product. Once the onboarding call is complete, your account will be activated and your monthly subscription billing will begin.

Alternatives to Superhuman

There is a lot of interest surrounding Superhuman’s unique waiting list and exclusivity in the email client market. But in terms of features and functionality, how does it measure up against the competition? Two of Superhuman’s most comparable competitors are Mailbird and Spike.

In many ways, Superhuman’s exclusivity can work against it, as the app is only available to iOS and Gmail users. But the competition offers a lot more flexibility in this regard. Mailbird, for example, is compatible with all Windows devices, so it’s marketed as an alternative to Outlook. It will also sync with a Google email address without any issues. Spike is even more flexible and is compatible with iOS, Windows, Gmail, and any other email provider.

Superhuman focuses intensely on improving user productivity and shortening the time spent managing and responding to emails. It does this through features such as AI email triage, minimalistic design, reply reminders, and email scheduling. When it comes to the competition, providers like Mailbird and Spike offer some of these features, but not all, and with less robust functionality.

With Mailbird, you can snooze emails for later and leverage keyboard shortcuts to optimize productivity. But you won’t get the same powerful email triage functionality—email prioritization needs to be manually implemented through your customized settings. Spike offers a smart email prioritization function similar to that of Superhuman, but the interface of the app overall is more cluttered.

Superhuman: Final verdict

Superhuman is a great solution for people who spend so much time on emails that they’ll feel a real difference with the productivity and time savings that the app can offer. For busy executives or entrepreneurs, it can save a lot of time and provide better visibility into your communication priorities without any extra filtering or customization by you.

While many competitors offer some similar functionalities and lower prices, Superhuman provides an exemplary user interface and simple design. Where competitors may gain an edge is with extra features. Superhuman focuses primarily on email, whereas competitors such as Spike and Mailbird also incorporate productivity features such as tasks, to-do lists, and in-app video calls.

Superhuman is also limited in terms of who can use it. It’s exclusive to Gmail and macOS/iOS, and there are no plans on the horizon to extend access to other operating systems or email providers.

If you’re a Gmail user with an iOS device, Superhuman is well worth a shot. It’s best suited for individual users seeking a solution to their email management challenges. But for team-wide use and extra productivity features, you may want to look elsewhere.

Further reading

For more information on getting the most productivity out of your email communications, check out our best email clients guide. Or, if you’re not a Gmail or iOS user and want to know about your options, you might like this best email client on Windows guide.

Yahoo Mail was once one of the leading email platforms, though it’s lost ground in recent years to Gmail and Apple Mail. However, if you’re looking at email clients that are available for your small business, it’s worth considering.

While providers such as Google and Microsoft offer small business email solutions as part of a suite of productivity tools, Yahoo offers email for small businesses as a standalone product. In our Yahoo Mail review, we will look at its pricing, features, interface, security, and support, and whether it can reclaim its place among the best email providers.

Plans and pricing

Yahoo Mail’s business pricing is now offered via Verizon Business, and depends on how many employees you want to set up accounts for. Each user account is called a mailbox, and the more mailboxes you add, the lower the price per box.

One single mailbox costs £2.55 a month, or you can get five for £1.27 or 10 for 95p each a month. There are bulk discounts for larger businesses, but you must contact Verizon to get a bespoke quote. These prices require at least a year’s subscription - you can pay monthly, though the prices are slightly higher. There is no price increase after the first year. When you set up your account, you can either link the mailboxes to a domain you already own or purchase a domain alongside it.

Yahoo’s prices compare well to the competition. Google’s cheapest option costs £4.80 per user a month, and Microsoft 365’s start at £4 per user a month. However, both these options include a full suite of tools, such as Microsoft’s Office software and the Google equivalents.

Features

While other email providers have added advanced new features in recent years, such as Gmail’s smart suggestions, Yahoo Mail has stagnated a bit. However, it has a few useful functions.

Each mailbox comes with 1TB of email storage. In comparison, Gmail’s cheapest option only comes with 30GB of storage per user.

Many small businesses use personal email addresses, such as those ending in @yahoo.com. But with Yahoo’s business email, you can use your company’s domain in all addresses—linda@yourcompany.com, for example—which looks significantly more professional. It’s easy to link your Yahoo Mail business account with your company’s domain.

It’s possible to set up to 30 aliases for each address. These are separate email addresses that redirect to a mailbox. So, if Linda is head of sales, you can have sales@yourcompany.com redirect to linda@yourcompany.com. However, unlike with Gmail, you can’t have an alias send messages to more than one mailbox.

Interface and in use

The set-up process is relatively straightforward: once you’ve chosen your plan, you either purchase a domain name to go with it, or link your existing domain. You may have to update your settings with your existing domain registrar to allow Yahoo access. But after that, you can access both the administrator control panel and your user accounts.

The main Yahoo Mail interface can be accessed via web browser or mobile app. There is no desktop app available, but you can link your Yahoo account to other desktop software, such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

The interface is simple and pleasant to look at. It’s customizable, with different color schemes, layouts, and densities available to suit the user’s preferences. Emails can be sorted into folders and sub-folders, so it’s easy to keep organized. You can open messages in tabs, similarly to how web browser tabs work, which is useful for multi-tasking.

However, advertisements constantly show up among your emails, in both your inbox and other folders. These look like normal emails but are highlighted, and can become irritating if you like to keep your inbox clean. There is no way to pay extra to remove them.

Support

There are several articles on Yahoo’s website that supply answers to common problems faced by business mail users, as well as a community forum. Yahoo always directs you to find answers here before allowing you to set up a ticket for contacting tech support.

If you do have to contact support, which can be through call, chat, or email, then the quality of the service can vary. Many customers have reported slow response times, and outsourced technicians with limited knowledge.

Security

Yahoo Mail has a few features to keep accounts secure. You can set mailboxes to require two-factor authentication via SMS, or alternatively, can use the handy Account Key feature. This sends a notification to a mobile device when you try to sign in, and you simply tap on the notification to confirm. The service also has effective spam filtering; almost all spam is identified and routed to the spam folder.

That said, those concerned about data privacy won’t be happy that their emails are scanned for the purpose of targeted ads. Yahoo Mail has also been the subject of notable security breaches in the past, including in 2013, when over one billion user accounts were hacked. Yahoo has fixed the weakness that allowed this to happen, though this doesn’t mean there aren’t others waiting to be exploited.

The competition

One of Yahoo Mail’s main competitors is Gmail, which is more expensive, with prices starting at £4.80 per user a month. This is partly because it comes as part of the Google Workspace suite. Still, it’s also worth noting that Gmail has several features that Yahoo Mail lacks, such as smart suggestions (a form of predictive text) and the ability to make aliases redirect to multiple users.

Another competitor is Rackspace. This is similarly priced to Yahoo Mail, with prices starting at £1.60 per user a month. Its webmail interface is basic and lacking in features, but Rackspace email works well with various desktop clients, and the security and support are both strong.

Final verdict

Yahoo Mail is an efficient but basic email solution for small businesses. Its interface is well organized and easy to use, and each mailbox comes with an impressive amount of storage.

Unfortunately, it lacks the more advanced features recently added by its competitors. There are also valid concerns about the reliability of the tech support and Yahoo’s history of security issues.

However, a significant advantage is that Yahoo Mail beats most competitors when it comes to price. If you want to set up email accounts for your business while on a tight budget, it’s an option well worth considering.

As one of the two heavyweight email providers and a viable contender for the top spot, it’s no surprise that Gmail is a hugely popular personal email service for the average user. As part of Google’s business-focused workspace offering, however, Gmail has plenty to offer for larger-scale company use as well. 

Google Workspace, a collection of productivity programs that includes Calendar, Meet, Docs, Forms, and many others, has a lot going on in terms of enhancing productivity - in this article, we’ll be focusing on how to get the most out of just one of its offerings, Gmail.

1. Custom @yourcompany addresses

Giving your business email addresses the personal touch means avoiding the typical ‘@gmail.com’ ending, and you can do just this in Gmail. With Gmail for business, you can create custom addresses for everyone in the business that end with a more professional-looking ‘@yourcompany.com’.

That being said, you will need to own the domain attached to this bespoke email ending. Other than that, though, it's a simple process to link the two, and you also gain the added ability of mailing list creation. You can set up, for example, ‘IT@yourcompany.com’ such that any emails sent to this address get redirected to everyone in the IT department.

2. Set up Google’s ‘help me write’ tool

Your team can deploy Google’s ‘help me write’ tool within Gmail if you have access to Google Workspace Labs, trimming the time it takes to complete lengthy admin tasks. This can aid the efficiency of the business as a whole by helping teams stay on top of communications.

Use this AI feature to draft all sorts of generic email messages or responses, such as introductions to business contacts, meeting invitations, team agendas and project priority announcements, and much more. 

3. Email organisation

Gmail offers all of the basic organizational tools that come as part of most email clients, granting you the ability to sort mail into folders or use labels. Emails can be given multiple labels too, allowing for categorization that can keep emails in your inbox when needed. 

With tools that are neither overbearing nor lacking in power, you can also use Gmail to categorize via the filter function. These filters are designed to catch and organize emails based on sender, receiver, or subject matter, redirecting them to specific folders in the process. 

Recovering deleted emails is also a straightforward affair using Gmail’s built-in tools, though it will only keep deleted emails on the system for up to 30 days. Following that, users have to refer to Gmail’s support page. 

4. Integration with desktop clients

Google has yet to release a desktop client for Gmail, meaning the full Gmail interface can only be accessed through a web browser or on the mobile app. Luckily, there's a simple solution to this issue, as integration with existing desktop apps is a breeze. 

For those who prefer using a desktop client, Gmail can be used seamlessly in apps such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. Changes made to a Gmail account within an external desktop client will take effect immediately in the web browser version of Gmail, as is the case for the inverse of that process. 

5. Get your agenda directly to your inbox

Constantly finding yourself running late for meetings? Well, Gmail can help with that too. Allowing you to go one step further than a simple pushed notification from Google Calendar, you can get your entire schedule of day events emailed directly to your inbox through Gmail. 

Once set up in the ‘event notifications’ page in Google Calendar, users won't need to spend any more time setting up individual reminders or searching through daily timetables to see what’s on the agenda for the day. 

6. Calls and chat within Gmail

Google Chat and Google Meet, both major features of the Google Workspace platform, are baked into Gmail, allowing for an enhanced level of workflow. Chat, which enables text-based messaging between team members, and Meet, a video-calling platform, are both accessible right from the web browser. 

Below the column which includes all of your email folders, nearer the bottom of the screen, some buttons allow a user to either set up a new meeting or join an existing meeting, as well as start a text chat conversation. On an email exchange with a client and need to fact-check something with a colleague? Send a chat instantly without needing to leave Gmail. 

7. Smart suggestions

Writing emails can take up a great deal of your time, but Gmail’s smart suggestions can speed up the process by predicting what you want to write. For example, if you start writing “My address is,” Gmail will load up your address. Simply press Tab to accept the suggestion.

There are also smart replies: if someone asks if you can attend a meeting on Monday, a possible reply offered will be “Monday works for me”. Its predictions aren’t always accurate, but you can edit the suggestions to add further information or personalise them.

8. 99.9% guaranteed uptime

With such a sizable infrastructure of servers, Google is a frontrunner in being able to deliver consistent, robust service across its platforms. Gmail, for example, doesn’t have scheduled downtime periods and offers a guaranteed 99.9% uptime - that equates to nothing over 45 minutes of downtime per month.

If this uptime drops below the figure Google claims, then the firm will tag three days worth of service onto a user’s Gmail contract. This increases to an add-on of seven days if uptime dips under 99%, and 15 days if uptime drops under 95%. 

9. Undo send

We’ve all written and sent off an email in a hurry, only to immediately notice that we’ve misspelled the recipient’s name or got our figures wrong. In 2015, Google added the useful Undo Send feature to Gmail.

After pressing send, an option to undo appears on screen for a short while, during which time Gmail holds off on actually sending the email. You can set this length of time to five, 10, 20, or 30 seconds. After undoing, you can go back into your draft and make changes before resending.

10. Third-party app integration

It’s possible to integrate a range of third-party apps into Gmail. For example, with the DocuSign extension, users can sign documents sent to them and immediately create a reply with the signed document attached.

Another useful extension is Dropbox for Gmail, which allows you to share Dropbox files directly through Gmail and save received attachments to your Dropbox account. Other popular Gmail add-ons include Asana, Trello, Zoom, and Todoist.

If you’re looking for an email solution to suit your business’s needs, then Gmail is well worth considering, as it comes with an impressive range of features. Plus, it’s easy to migrate your emails from another system or synchronise your Gmail account with desktop apps.

Further reading

For more information on getting the most productivity out of your email communications, check out our best email clients guide. Or, if you’re not a Gmail or iOS user and want to know about your options, you might like this best email client on Windows guide.

After allaying fears that it was headed for the scrapheap before celebrating its 20th birthday earlier this year, Gmail continues to prove itself both innovative and reliable.

While it's important that platforms respond to the ever-changing technological landscape we live in with new offerings, there's also something to be said for the platforms that maintain a sense of their core ethos. Gmail does just that by blending elegant simplicity with seamless integration of new features such as generative AI tools or enhanced data and security capabilities. 

Despite the changes, Gmail still allows users to effortlessly blend their workflows with other Workspace apps. It also maintains a near 100% uptime, while constantly expanding its storage capacity. But it's also doing the one thing it set out to do with increasing efficiency; allowing users to communicate professionally over an interface that's as familiar as it is practical. 

Gmail review: Setup

While we're sure we don't have to tell you how to set up a personal Gmail account, using the platform for a business or an organization comes with a few extra steps. To begin with, you'll need to purchase a Google Workspace account, which can be frustrating. Unfortunately, while standalone business Gmail subscriptions would likely be welcomed by many, this is just something businesses have to deal with. There's also a silver lining here, as your company will gain access to the wider Google Workspace environment, which promises online storage, company-wide or team-focused calendars, and video conferencing capabilities through Google Meet.

Once you've signed up for Google Workspace and purchased an account, your company IT or admin team can purchase a new '@yourcompany' domain or use an existing one. If you buy a new one through Google, the setup process should be relatively painless, as the domain will have already been verified. If not, you'll have to verify your domain by finding out who your domain registrar is.

Once your domain's been set up, you can establish Gmail groups to organize meetings and events or work on projects across the organization. Setting up a group is also pretty straightforward, requiring simply that you sign into Google Groups, click 'Create Group,' and enter the group settings and information before it's up and running.

For any growing company, the next logical concern would be managing new and existing employees, ensuring that they have access to their individual accounts and that these accounts are easily secured and managed.

While all you need to do here is set up the necessary information for a new employee, including name, Gmail address, and password, it's worth bearing in mind that each additional user will incur an increase to your bill dependent on what plan you're using.

If your organization is at enterprise scale, you'll have dedicated IT administrators who, through Google, can manage two-step verification systems to protect employee accounts, among other security measures.

Smaller businesses can pursue similar security measures and Google provides a helpful list of steps to take for companies setting up their Gmails. It suggests that admins, among other things, set up recovery information processes and back-up codes in the event two-step verification stops working.

Gmail review: Navigation  

Though few will remember exactly what Gmail's original layout looked like, even new Gmail users would probably be able to work their way around it. That's because, practically speaking, the layout hasn't changed that much. Make it past the login page and you'll still be greeted by the old familiar email stream and folder menu. 

The folder selection tool features all the email categories you'd imagine, including starred, snoozed, sent, draft, scheduled, spam, and plenty of others. If you're finding that the folder list is making your Gmail homepage look slightly too cluttered, you can easily hide it by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the top left of the screen. 

Also featured on the left, just below these lines, is a toggle that allows users to switch between a 'mail' and 'meet' view, streamlining the often parallel office-essential tasks of email sending and meeting attendance. Hitting the 'meet' button transforms the familiar Gmail layout into a new page fit with a list of your day's meetings on the left, a meeting-by-meeting overview taking up most of the space on the right, and options to either start a new meeting or join an existing one.

You can transform the inbox in another way by hitting the settings cog in the top right – this allows you to alter the visual theme of your inbox as well as alter the inbox settings to display different types of messages at the top, whether unread or starred. 

Gmail review: Features 

While simply firing off important emails might be at the top of your agenda, other tasks may call for a greater level of complexity in terms of functionality and feature set. Gmail provides for most of the more nuanced organizational workload requirements, coming equipped with all manner of handy features to improve workflow, efficiency, and communication.

On a staff level, Gmail can cut admin tasks in half through useful integrations with other Google Workplace features such as Google Calendar, which allows daily meeting agendas to be emailed directly to employees. Individual staff members can also get a greater handle on emails, with Gmail allowing users to schedule email sends, request read receipts on emails, and even un send emails in the event of a staff mistake or last-minute change to email content.

On a wider enterprise level, making the investment into enterprise-grade Gmail provides IT staff and admin teams with a considerable set of advantages. Perhaps most notable is Google's guarantee of 99.9% uptime to its enterprise users, with the firm able to brag that it has no scheduled downtime periods. Gmail's claims to 99.9% uptime equate to no more than 45 minutes of downtime per month. If uptime does fall below this figure, Google will add on three days of service to a customer's Gmail contract, with this amount of days increasing in parallel with increasing downtime. 

Gmail review: Business vs enterprise

There are several different plans you can use for Gmail, all with various merits and differing price points. The deciding factor will likely be the size of your business and the amount of value you'll get out of the more advanced offerings.

At the lower end, there's the business edition which comes in three different tiers. There's the 'Business Starter' edition which comes at £5 per month per user, the 'Business Standard' edition clocking in at £10 per month per user, and the 'Business Plus' edition, coming at £15 per month per user. These editions are aimed at businesses with between 1 and 300 members of staff, and all three come with a required 1-year commitment as standard. 

In terms of basic email admin capabilities, these three editions are largely the same, equipped with custom email addresses, multiple addresses per user, addresses at multiple domains, admin-controlled mailing lists, and user-controlled mailing lists. Where they do differ, however, is in storage capacity. The business starter edition caps out at 30GB in email storage, while the Business Standard and Business Plus come with 2TB and 5TB respectively. Business Plus also comes with the added 'Vault for email' capabilities, as well as eDisocvery and archiving features. 

The 'Enterprise Standard' and 'Enterprise Plus' require that your organization contact Google directly for a quote on an individualized price, though these editions do offer a greater range of features. 

Both enterprise editions offer flexible pooled storage across your entire organization – essentially unlimited – as well as a whole suite of added security features such as data loss prevention, Gmail log search in BigQuery, and advanced phishing and malware protection. Enterprise Plus goes even further, offering advanced email attachment scanning, upgraded email encryption, and client-side encryption. 

It's worth noting that advanced email delivery options are identical across both business and enterprise editions, which can create a slightly more difficult decision for businesses trying to establish which option is the best value for money.

Gmail review: Is it worth it? 

While Gmail and the required Workspace suite offer a number of enticing features for the prospective business user, it's important to bear in mind the extent to which Gmail stacks up to its rivals. Its chief competitor, Microsoft Outlook, also comes as part of a wider productivity suite, Microsoft 365, and is priced fairly similarly, with the exception of it's highest-end business tier.

Microsoft 365 'Business Basic' is marginally cheaper at £4.90 per user per month, whereas Microsoft 365 'Business Standard' is marginally more expensive at £10.30 per user per month. Microsoft 365 'Business Premium' costs £18.10 per user per month. 

Outlook's biggest advantage comes in its storage capacity, with even the most basic Microsoft 365 plan offering 1TB of capacity per employee compared to the far smaller 30GB that Google offers on its equivalent plan. 

That being said, Gmail is still a powerful offering for businesses as part of the wider Google Workspace ecosystem, and the value of it as an offering will inevitably depend on your individual business needs. 

When it comes down to email clients for business, a lot of people would agree there are only two major contenders: Microsoft Outlook and Google's Gmail. While Gmail has long been a household name, Outlook has slowly but surely been defining itself as an impressive option for business requirements.   

There are plenty of clients out there for personal use – Yahoo, AOL, Proton, even private domains – but business use case clients are a different breed. For enterprise execs making decisions on which ones to use, many more factors must be considered. Email clients need to offer scalability, for example, so more accounts and features can be added as the company grows.

As a bundled app of Microsoft's productivity suite, Microsoft 365, Outlook fits the bill as a business-class email client. In recent months, Microsoft has chocked it full of new, mainly generative AI-based, features, and there's plenty of functionality to dive into as we do below. 

We also take a look at Microsoft's pricing structures around the platform, which are locked into the overall Microsoft 365 package, as well as the setup process for any enterprise users looking to get started on the platform. 

Microsoft Outlook: Setup

You'll have to purchase a Microsoft 365 package before doing anything (see later in the review for more detail on the various plans), which will involve either using your own Microsoft account or setting up a new one. Following that, you can start managing your business logins and credentials from the Microsoft 365 admin center.

From there, you can add user accounts one at a time which gives each staff member Microsoft 365 licenses, sign-in credentials, and Microsoft 365 mailboxes. The admin center (pictured above) features a dashboard view which is useful for navigating this process.

All you have to do is fill in the details of the employee, including name, domain, and password settings, the latter of which can be either auto-generated or set by the admin. Then, in the 'Assign product licenses' tab, select the location and license for the user (if there are no licenses available, you can buy additional ones).

Your work here won't ever be over from the set-up perspective as staff join and leave the companies all the time. This requires a level of flexibility on behalf of the client in terms of account alterations. Luckily, Outlook is well equipped for this and users can change names, and email addresses, alter account access, restore users, and remove former staff members entirely. 

Microsoft Outlook: Navigation 

If you've never used Outlook before, there are a few key things to know about its layout. Longtime Gmail users, for example, will notice that the inbox and email viewer are quite different on Microsoft's platform.

Where Gmail's screen is taken up almost entirely by the inbox, Outlook is separated into three main sections, with a navigation menu on the left, an inbox in the center, and an email viewer on the right.

You can alter the size of these sections, though limitations on the stretch tool will ensure that the layout always consists of three main sections. However, clicking on any one of the emails in the inbox opens it up in the email viewer.

One particularly handy feature of the Outlook layout is the slim bar at the far left of the screen which allows users to toggle between other Microsoft 365 applications such as Word or PowerPoint. This makes integrating Outlook into the wider 365 productivity suite a breeze and cross-functionality is as instant as you'd expect – clicking a Word document email attachment opens it up in the web version of Word, for example.  

Navigating Outlook is fairly intuitive and won't take much getting used to if you've used similar email clients. Though, there is potential for the home screen of Outlook to feel cluttered, so make sure to familiarize yourself with every function.    

Microsoft Outlook: Features

It would be easy to rate Outlook's features based on its integration with the wider 365 productivity suite – access to the industry favorites of word processing and presentation design tools is certainly a big plus. There are features within Outlook itself that business users will also find appealing, however, such as the built-in email editing functions.

While there are plenty of third-party editing tools available for use within email clients, having powerful spelling and grammar check tools located directly within Outlook is useful for maintaining professionalism and efficiency while firing off corporate communications.

As one might expect from any software provider looking to stay on top of the latest innovations, there are also a raft of AI features built into Outlook, powered by Microsoft's homegrown Copilot technology. 

By integrating Copilot into Outlook, users can generate a first draft of an email from scratch or draft responses to emails already in their inbox, after which they can edit the length or add details.  

Copilot can also be used to catch up on lengthy conversations by summarizing key pieces of information from email chains as well as assisting users by making suggestions about email clarity, length, and tone. 

Microsoft Outlook: Pricing 

As with any business decision, pricing should take center stage alongside product features and functions. In the case of Outlook, users will need to purchase the wider Microsoft 365 package, so it's worth also considering the features and functions of the suite's other software. 

For the purposes of this review, however, we'll try mainly to focus on the relative benefits to Outlook brought about by the varying plans and pricing arrangements that Microsoft offers prospective users.

While Outlook for home and personal use plans range from a free version (just an Outlook account) to a $99.99 yearly family subscription, Outlook business plans start at $5 per user per month for the Microsoft 365 Business Basic Plan.

This plan features ad-free email and calendar functions, advanced Outlook security systems, and lets businesses add up to 300 users. It also comes equipped with 50 GB of mailbox storage (and 1 TB of cloud storage) per user.

Coming in next is the Microsoft 365 Business Standard at $12.50 per user per month. This plan features all the same features as the Microsoft 365 Business Basic Plan along with some extra ones. 

These additional features, however, are mostly related to the wider 365 suite, such as access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The Business Standard plan also webinars and large meeting capabilities.

The priciest plan is the Microsoft 365 Business Premium Plan, coming in at $20 per user per month. Again, most of the improvements are not specific to Outlook, though the ability to remotely wipe lost or stolen devices adds a level of security to potentially compromised email accounts. 

Microsoft Outlook: Is it worth it? 

All things considered, Outlook is a powerful client and a worthy contender for any business or enterprise considering its corporate email environment. 

Though the layout can feel cluttered, it's functional and relatively straightforward to use and comes equipped with a large range of features that can help a workforce draft, send, and organize emails more efficiently. 

Those considering Outlook should bear in mind the wider 365 offering as well, though. The cheapest Outlook plan (see earlier) has more than enough functionality if you're planning to just use the email client. If you think your organization might benefit from the full package, however, you should consider upping to one of the more expensive plans. 

If you own an Apple device, you probably already know about iCloud, the online cloud storage service provided by Apple. But you may not know that it is also an email service, and that you can use it without having to own an Apple device. In fact, iCloud Mail in many ways rivals the most well-known and best email providers.

In this iCloud review, we take a closer look at iCloud Mail, including its plans and pricing, feature, interface, support, and security.

iCloud: Plans and pricing

Anyone who purchases an Apple device automatically gets a free iCloud account with 5GB of storage. But you don’t have to purchase a device to be able to take advantage. You can sign up for an account and use iCloud Mail on a non-Apple device as well.

A storage limit of 5GB might seem reasonable if you’re not a heavy email user, but the thing to remember is that the included storage is for everything connected to iCloud, not just email. So if you also use iCloud for backing up photos, videos, and music, then 5GB won’t go very far.

But Apple also provides three paid plans with different amounts of storage. For 79p month, you can get 50GB of storage; £2.49 a month will get you 200GB; and £6.99 a month a whopping 2TB!

Features

Aside from offering storage at decent prices, iCloud also offers several other great features.

Apple device owners will love how easy it is to connect and have their email synced across their devices, with push notifications so you’ll always be alerted when new messages arrive.

iCloud Mail can also be used with Microsoft Outlook on Windows computers, but you’ll need to install the iCloud for Windows app, and the set-up may not be as straightforward. Some people have issues with duplicate contacts and calendars, or their version of Outlook may not be supported.

iCloud’s spam filter does a good job of detecting spam and making sure it doesn’t hit your inbox. No spam filter is 100% accurate, however, so if some unwanted messages do slip through, you can mark them as spam and help train the app to remove similar messages in the future.

Much like labels in Gmail, folders in iCloud let you organize your mail the way you like. There is also the ability to create filters to sort messages based on simple criteria, and you can search for mail by sender, recipient, or subject.

This feature allows you to also create easily-accessible folders for your favorite senders by clicking on the sender’s name in the message header, and selecting VIP. A folder for this sender will then appear in the sidebar of iCloud for easy access.

Interface and in use

To get started, you’ll need an Apple ID. If you’re setting up an Apple ID for the first time, and you choose to create an iCloud email address as part of the setup, an iCloud email account will be created along with your new Apple ID.

If you already have an Apple ID and want to add an iCloud email address, you can do that on a Mac computer from internet accounts by ticking the box next to the Mail app after selecting the iCloud tab. On an iOS device, go to Settings, iCloud, and then Mail. The last step for both is to choose the name you want to go before @icloud.com.

You can then send and receive emails from the Mail app on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad - or you can choose the web interface. This is very similar to both Mac and iOS apps, although closer to what you see on an iPad. The web interface will run on any device that has a web browser, making it truly cross-platform.

Support

iCloud has its own dedicated support page on the Apple website, which contains links to various help articles; a page to check the iCloud system status; and the Apple support community forums, where you can ask questions for other Apple users to answer.

If you have a problem that you need more direct help with, there is the Get Support section, which works in the same way as it does for any other Apple product or service. After choosing from a series of topics, you’ll eventually end up on a page where you can provide your phone number, and someone from Apple will call you back.

Security

iCloud provides several industry-standard security features, such as two-factor authentication (2FA), security tokens, and TLS 1.2 encryption. Two-factor authentication makes your devices more secure by requiring both a password and a six-digit verification code to access your accounts.

Native Apple mobile apps like Mail, Contact, and Calendar use security tokens for authentication, which means the devices themselves don’t need to store your iCloud password.

The encryption for iCloud Mail only covers the traffic between your device and the server: the data stored in its IMAP servers isn’t encrypted. This approach to IMAP encryption is what most IMAP providers offer. It’s not fully HIPAA compliant, but it’s unlikely you’d need to comply with HIPAA except for business purposes, and you probably wouldn’t be using icloud.com addresses for your business anyway.

The competition

Apple is just one of the tech giants that has ventured into providing email services. Others include Google, with Gmail/Workspaces, and Microsoft with Outlook/Microsoft 365. All offer email, online storage and backup services, together with access to a variety of other apps for contacts, calendars, and more.

Gmail and Outlook are the free versions, and both offer 15GB of mailbox storage. In Google’s case, that 15GB is shared across Google Drive and Photos, whereas Microsoft offers an additional 5GB storage for OneDrive other than email. Both also offer paid personal and business plans.

Microsoft’s paid plans are under Microsoft 365: personal plans range from £59.99 to £79.99 a year and Business plans from £4.50 to £16.60 a month. Both offer mailbox storage of 50GB and OneDrive storage of 1TB.

Paid Google personal accounts are under Google One, and range from £15.99 to £79.99 a year for 100GB to 7TB of storage. Business accounts are under Google Workspace, and range from £4.14 to £13.80 a month for 30GB to 5TB of storage.

Probably the main reason you’d need to consider Google or Microsoft over Apple for email is that Apple doesn’t offer custom domains, i.e. yourname@yourbusiness.com, whereas the others do. With iCloud, your email address has to end in icloud.com, which makes it less than ideal for business users.

Final verdict

iCloud Mail is easy to use, reasonably priced with good storage limits, and has a useful web interface, which means it can be used on any device. It also has decent spam filtering and tight integration with Apple products.

But while it shares many features with the other big email service providers, its lack of an ability to use custom domains to match your business branding means it can’t really be considered a a viable option for business email.

• Read our iCloud Drive review.

Google is rolling out a minor refresh of the Gmail user interface that might offer a productivity boost to Workspace customers.

The change will pull Chat, Spaces, and Meet apps closer together as integrated apps that sit in a sidebar on the right.

Google initially announced these changes back in February with a view to rolling them out in April, though it has only just begun that process. Gmail users can expect to see the changes over the coming weeks. Later this year, the features will be added to Gmail for tablets.

By adding icons for Mail, Meet, Spaces and Chat into one sidelined list, Gmail essentially tidies that section up and rids itself of showing multiple conversations from each of the apps. They're still easy to access and jump into any conversation, but they will instead be in the form of a pop-out when the cursor hovers over the icon.

If you're resistant to change, the new UI can be switched back to the old one, for the time being. If you have an account that doesn't have Chat enabled, you will still get the new look, but in a Gmail-only view as a default.

The changes form part of Google's new approach to Workspace that offers a more unified look and feel. That includes new machine learning capabilities that aim to improve productivity. The new Gmail search functionality is a good example of this.

'Intent matching', a machine learning tool that helps find topics related to search queries has been added. With this users should have a better way of finding specific contacts, emails or files. For instance, the feature will prioritise search results for email addresses and first names, rather than those based on last names as it previously did. Searches will also be personalised based on previous searches, so the correspondents you speak with most will appear at the top.

Xerox has announced the acquisition of UK-based print and digital marketing services provider Go Inspire as it looks to increase its global digital services presence.

The move is expected to improve the transformation of Xerox’s transactions and direct mail services into multi-channel communications, as well as accelerate the company’s growth across the EMEA region.

In an announcement, Xerox said it is focused on “widening the scope” of its Digital Services and Customer Engagement Services.

"Go Inspire's capabilities will support the transformation of our transactional and direct mail services into multi-channel communications, accelerate growth in EMEA and create new avenues for us to help current and new clients," said Darren Cassidy, UK & Ireland Managing Director and senior vice president of EMEA Global Document Services at Xerox.

Based in Leicester, Go Inspire is a service marketing agency that combines strategic marketing consultancy with data science and analytics, digital transformation, customer loyalty programme design, creative marketing services and print and mail services.

The firm services customers across the EMEA region, delivering loyalty schemes and marketing solutions to household names such as Sky, BT, Tesco, Waitrose, and Lakeland.

Go Inspire positions itself as “large enough to be secure and credible, but not too big to lose the ability to provide bespoke services for clients.”

Xerox said the takeover will help boost its aim of bringing innovative solutions to the workplace. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“We are thrilled to join the Xerox team and eager to contribute to the growth of Xerox Digital Services,” commented Patrick Headley, chief executive officer at Go Inspire.

“Together with Xerox, we will expand the portfolio of high value services for our expanding client base throughout the UK and beyond.”

One of the biggest questions in the realm of information security centres on how secure Gmail is, and how much the platform respects user privacy.

Simply put, Gmail is as secure as the steps you take to secure your Google account, and your awareness of incoming risk, allow. As for privacy, it’s a little more complicated.

We break down how to secure your Gmail account, and the steps you can take to block email marketing trackers and bolster your privacy as much as possible.

Implementing 2FA

For most, Google account security comes down to ensuring you use a unique and strong password, and whether or not you have two-factor authentication (2FA) in place.

Twitter recently published a transparency report that revealed only 2.3% of active accounts have 2FA enabled, and of those users the vast majority were employing SMS-based 2FA. That's the least secure option, but still better than nothing. Hardly anyone, 0.5%, was using a hardware security key, while under a third (30.9%) of responders used an authenticator app.

Google offers multiple types of 2FA. The first is by voice or text message, which we wouldn’t recommend as it's the easiest option for a cyber criminal to overcome thanks to the relative simplicity of a SIM-swap attack. It’s better than nothing, again, and most people won't enter the threat radar where such an attack is likely anyway.

The second option involves Google prompts being sent to another device you're signed in on. This avoids the SIM-swap vulnerability by requiring an attacker to be in possession of the device. There’s also the use of authentication codes churned out by Google Authenticator.

We recommend using both: one as your default and the other for those times when that option isn't available to you for whatever reason. You will also get a set of ten-digit single-use codes that you can store somewhere safe as another backup for signing into your account in an emergency.

The final option is the most secure, but can be expensive and more intrusive on the user experience: a security key. These keys are either of the hardware variety, such as a YubiKey or Google's own Titan key, but can also come built into your smartphone. The use of a security key is mandatory if you are enrolled in the Advanced Protection programme at Google, for accounts that are at a greater risk of targeted attack.

Consider how the Google ecosystem wraps multiple aspects of your online life by collecting all kinds of data – email, web, personal assistants, the list goes on – and that means access to your core account is a highly prized target for cyber criminals.

Access to your Google account gives access to Gmail, which gives access to password resets, which gives access to, well, almost everything.

Perform a security checkup

It's a good idea to perform a security check-up regularly, and Google makes that easy. Just visit the security section under manage your account: security-checkup. This lets you remove account access from non- essential apps. You should also keep your OS, browsers, and apps up-to-date and remove any browser extensions and apps you no longer use.

What about the privacy issue? There's functionality that’s one of the big draws for users; such as adding delivery confirmation email data to Google Calendar. So, how worried should you be? That depends on your aversion to the collection of such data and the importance of the functionality it enables.

Google will say, rightly, that what it collects is mostly metadata more than anything. What's more, Google will also assure users that, for example, the data found from those automated email scans isn't used for advertising purposes.

According to Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, "we don't sell your information to anyone, and we don't use information in apps where you primarily store personal content – such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos – for advertising purposes, period".

Moving to another email provider, such as Outlook.com, may not be the answer you're looking for either, as metadata collection and user activity data are employed almost universally. Sure, there are niche providers that are more privacy-focused, but you lose the type of cross-application functionality that drove you to Gmail in the first place.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has released a brand-new tool for businesses to check the strength of their email security in a bid to reduce the number of cyber attacks they suffer.

Announcing the new service at the organisation’s annual CYBERUK conference, Email Security Check will assess if a business is vulnerable to attacks by checking two aspects of cyber security using publicly available online domain information.

The online service will check to see if anti-spoofing protocols such as domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC) have been configured correctly which can help prevent cyber criminals from sending emails purporting to be from a business.

DMARC helps businesses verify their email headers which will ensure emails sent from inside the organisation are trusted by the receiver, while those sent by cyber criminals attempting to spoof the company through email scams are seen as untrusted and less likely to be opened.

The second aspect of cyber security assessed by Email Security Check is email privacy. It does this by checking for privacy protocols such as transport layer security (TLS) are implemented in an organisation’s email client.

TLS is an industry-standard method of encrypting data between senders and can be found in most modern email providers. Building on the work from secure sockets layer (SSL), TLS ensures email communications cannot be hijacked and tampered with while in transit.

The NCSC said Email Security Check is a developing service and it will be adding more features “in the near future”.

The cyber organisation also said the service should not be confused with one that checks domains or individual emails for malicious activity. All suspicious emails should be reported to internal IT teams and the NCSC at report@phishing.gov.uk.

“Email plays a central role in how organisations communicate every day so it’s vital that technical teams have measures in place to protect email systems from abuse,” said Paul Maddinson, NCSC director for national resilience and strategy.

“Our new Email Security Check tool helps users identify where they can do more to prevent spoofing and protect privacy and offers practical advice on how to stay secure.

“By following the recommended actions, organisations can help bolster their defences, demonstrate they have taken security seriously, and make life harder for cyber criminals.”

The tool is a stripped-back version of the existing Mail Check service offered by the NCSC, which is another free initiative that checks for DMARC and TLS compliance but is only available to public sector entities.

According to NCSC figures, organisations’ adoption of recommended controls varies wildly with some having just 7% of the bare minimum security measures in place.

The Email Security Check website was made available today and requires no details, personal or otherwise, from the user to access the service.

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Why is email still a thing?’. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Hi, I'm Keumars Afifi-Sabet.

Sabina Weston

I'm Sabina Weston.

Adam Shepherd

And I'm Adam Shepherd.

Keumars

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast.

Adam

Now, we've spoken about a lot of business tools on this show. But there's one that reigns supreme above all others, the unquestionable king of business productivity tools and the glue that holds the modern enterprise together. I am, of course, referring to the humble email client. The venerable technology has been around for half a century but despite its advanced years, it's still an absolutely essential tool for every commercial business on the face of the planet. Without internet access, many businesses would simply grind to a halt. But with so much progress in the field of cloud based collaboration and communication services over the past few years, why is this decades old technology still such an utterly dominant force? So to kick off this discussion, then, let's talk about our inboxes. How many emails would you say you send in the average week? Because I know, for me, I, I don't think I can even count but it's got to be in the hundreds at this point. Sabina, what about you?

Sabina

Um, for me, it really varies, you know, I've only sent let me see this week. I think I only must have sent like, around, like, 10 of them, just by maybe a bit more.

Keumars

It's not bad going.

Sabina

I mean, it's, it's, I mean, yeah, I guess when you do like news and stuff, you always want to like comment and stuff. So I try to sort of like, you know, contact as many people as possible and, but, you know, there are days where like, I send that amount, like, you know, per day. So it's probably like, gonna be like, 10 emails per day sometimes, or something like that. So. So yeah, I'm looking through this, I think the 19th of January, just looking at my at my sent emails from the 19th of January, was a very, was a very busy day for me. I don't know why, but it was just like, I have no idea why I sent all these emails. I think it was about like, 5G at US airports, that we wanted a comment on and yeah, so this is why I was like talking to a lot of analysts. But But yeah, it varies greatly, like sometimes where it's like, you know, I receive a lot of emails, but like, don't reply to them. And other days I'm like more, yeah, I like to engage more on other days. So yeah, what about you?

Adam

Yeah, for me, it's, it's, most of them go unreplied to. But even so, the amount of emails that I send on a weekly basis - I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be able to relate to this - it sometimes feels that a good chunk of my job is just sending and replying to emails. Keumars, what about you?

Keumars

I think I'm maybe somewhere in between the two of you in terms of how many I send a week. Even then I look back on the week and think, who have I been talking to? Who am I communicating with? But the real question, I think, for me is, how many emails do you receive in a week? I think it's very, very easy to get absolutely overblown, with people trying to communicate with you.

Sabina

Yeah, I mean, it's it really is, you know, it does have like, a big potential to like impact the way you work and just like Adam said, like, I think he said something about like your job being mostly replying to emails, that's actually proven to be an issue with with a lot of companies especially, I think there was was research which I covered last year about how UK based employees spend nearly one working day each week just managing their inboxes so when you work five days a week, and like one day out of these five is just spent on emails, I mean, obviously it's like stretched out throughout the week right? But like, that's, you know, that's a fifth of people's jobs is just emails.

Keumars

Yeah, I can totally relate with that. It got to a point last year for me where I had to set like a development objective for myself to manage my inbox because it was overwhelming me in you know, other respects of my of my work too, because you know, let's say you have a very messy desk sometimes, you're not gonna probably be as productive as you might be with a very nice and clean desk. In the same way my inbox was a, you know, a garbage fire and I needed to find ways of managing this in order to manage the rest of my workload.

Adam

Okay, so call out time. How many unread emails do you have in your inbox right now?

Sabina

Oh my god, this is probably gonna get me fired.

Adam

I guarantee that I've got you beat.

Sabina

No, 12,589.

Adam

Go on, Keumars.

Keumars

So in terms of the actual emails from from real people, I'd imagine, let me have a look. Okay, slightly better than I thought; it's 29 unread messages.

Adam

29?!

Keumars

29. The, the the development objective worked, I am now really pretty much on top of my inbox. Overall, however, if you include newsletters, different kinds of promotions, and so on: 3,832.

Adam

You are both like tiny babies. I currently have 60,981 unread emails in my inbox.

Sabina

How many years have you been at IT Pro?

Adam

Um, well, that's so I've been, I've been here coming up for six years now.

Sabina

I still, I think if you compare it, I'm still doing, I'm still like on a bigger increase than you are.

Keumars

You're on your way.

Adam

That's still with like, intermittent, you know, select all, mark as read every couple of years or so. Cause yeah, beyond a certain point, it's, it's just like, Okay, I don't need this email from, you know, like two and a half years ago, with, you know, this two email chain about a press release. But it's, I think it's indicative of how reliant we are collectively, not even just as an industry, but the business community at large, that the kind of struggle to maintain kind of Inbox Zero, quote unquote, is, you know, such a such a goal for many people, you know, just keeping on top of email traffic is something that actually has to be worked at. And you know, people have to have strategies and plans for; which, when you think about it, is kind of crazy, considering how many alternative communication systems we have. So like, do you think that email is more or less convenient for you guys than something like WhatsApp, or Slack or video chats?

Keumars

That's a, that's a very good question. Because I actually think it's more and less convenient, in different ways. I think the, what it comes down to for me is - and I've been thinking about this, because I hate email, and I want it to die - but I think it serves a very important purpose in a sense that it's a space where you know, it's a medium where a lot of people who are going to try to communicate with me only live there, they're not bleeding into places like WhatsApp or you know, whatever platform you might choose to use, you know, where you might you know, actually choose to speak to people, your contacts and so on. It's a very useful way of keeping people at arm's length to some extent.

Sabina

Yeah, I think I agree. Yeah, I think email, I use email for work, mostly. Slack I dedicate mostly to sort of like within company messaging, like with you guys, while WhatsApp I don't have any, I don't want to use WhatsApp for work. WhatsApp is for me for receiving dog pictures from my mum. That's like, WhatsApp is like you know, personal time and yeah, that's that's for my friends and family. So I tried to keep people off WhatsApp, definitely. Email for me, I treat it some as a sort of like, I kind of treat it like an instant messaging platform as well a bit, especially since I have it on my phone. I you know, I answer a lot of emails like from my phone. Yeah. Especially if I'm if I'm out somewhere. And if you if you have time off, for example, if you're going on annual leave, you mute your email app, right. Yeah, and that's for one that you set out of office for and yeah, so this is like for me email is, is definitely a good way to sort of like to to establish the sort of like healthy boundary between work and personal life.

Adam

Hmm. Well, here's an interesting question then. Do you think your opinion would be different if you had have a dedicated work phone with like a separate WhatsApp account. And you know, separate instances of, you know, things like text messaging and WhatsApp and other kind of - or like a dedicated business Twitter account or Instagram account or whatever that was just for kind of work messaging.

Sabina

Yeah, I think I think so. I mean, my, my flatmate has a work phone. And so I see the way she sort of like, struggles with two devices at times and like, tries to make sure she has both. I think it's an added stress, because like, you're not only like trying to not lose your own phone, but also your company phone. So I think it's just like a bit of an added burden. But then at the end of the day, like, I see her just, like, switch her phone off, like, her work phone off and to me that's, you know, that's, that's pretty cool. I mean, that's, you know, she's like, she switches off at 6pm. And that's it for the day, I only like, switches it back on in the morning. And, for me, that's great. Like, for me, I still see emails, like every every part of the day. So yeah, there's like, coming coming into my phone, even if I shut my work laptop, so yeah, yeah.

Adam

And I think in terms of the convenience of basically anything that isn't email, I do find it much, much easier to kind of get, get things done quickly, in terms of speaking to people and getting information and having those very kind of quick interactions where you don't necessarily need to dump a load of information. It's just, you know, Hi, do you have X, or, you know, are you free at X time, done. And there are, there are a few kind of professional contacts that I know well enough to, you know, to have their their numbers and to talk to them on, you know, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger or whatever, whatever it might be. And I find those interactions are much, much more convenient than people that I have to email. And it's the same thing with Slack, there are a few people, kind of within any organisation that will default to email, even when platforms like Slack or Google Chat or whatever, are, are available. And having to kind of fall back on email feels really clunky and slow, when you're used to things like Slack, which have not just the kind of the sort of instant response quality, but also the flexibility in terms of things like sharing links, or videos or, you know, working collaboratively and all all the kind of stuff that that goes along with instant messaging. So I do I do find the idea of doing more of my professional communication over WhatsApp and instant messengers to be quite an attractive proposition.

Keumars

I mean, the user interface is certainly loads better on platforms like Slack, and the overall experience is just so much cleaner and more pleasant. And, you know, it's like a godsend that we don't need to use email to talk with each other. We don't need you know, hundred message long email chains, sharing GIFs and so on.

Adam

But there are plenty of organisations where that's still the case. Yeah,

Keumars

Absolutely true. And I can't, I can't believe that, for me, it used to be that way; places I've worked in the past and just moving on from that, it's, it's so much better. But I guess, in that sense, there's still a place and a role for email. When you're, I guess more communicating externally, then amongst yourselves or with personal contacts.

Adam

But Slack has been rolling out kind of more and more tools to try and make that kind of cross company collaboration easier. You know, they've got things like shared channels, they've got things like shared workspaces, single channel guests, for bringing in people from partner organisations, all of which is kind of designed to make it easier to hook two kind of Slack instances together. And Microsoft Teams is doing similar things. And this idea, I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more traction, because it does, you know, let organisations move away from that whole long, winding email thread thing, and there is nothing worse then trying to find one specific piece of information that is buried in an email thread with like, 80 responses in it.

Keumars

Yeah, absolutely. I suppose the the question would be, how would that work in practice? Because it helps me to kind of look at Slack or alternative platforms as a way of, you know, this is your organisation, these are the people within, you know, these are the different departments and you know, who to contact for what, and it's all very, you know, there's a space, it's quite clean. Now, if you try and bring in other organisations and other Slack instances, I think it could potentially get very messy if it's not managed carefully.

Adam

Well, I have had some experience with this. And it is surprisingly easy to kind of to bring those external individuals and external organisations into Slack environments, you know, it's very straightforward to bring bring them in and give them access to a specific subset of channels, whether that's channels for, you know, particular projects, or for ongoing kind of areas of concern. For example, if you have a, an MSP who's providing IT services, you can bring them in and give them kind of full DM access to anyone in the organisation, but restrict their access to kind of channels within Slack environments, to specific kind of IT focused ones. And the kind of permissions and access controls around that are actually really quite robust for that kind of thing. And it's so much more convenient than having to raise kind of email tickets.

Keumars

I, I'm not going to argue with that. I absolutely don't think there's much about email that is convenient.

Adam

So one of the features that Slack tried to roll out to try and kind of help enable this kind of cross company connection was Slack DMs, which was part of the kind of overall Slack Connect kind of feature set, which was essentially a way for anyone on Slack to DM anyone else on Slack, regardless of whether or not they were part of the same kind of company or organisation. They could just send them a message from their Slack instance, to the other person's Slack instance. But that was very swiftly dropped.

Keumars

There were lots of harassment concerns, if I remember correctly, I think it was 24 hours, 48 hours, something like that before they rolled it back.

Adam

It was a very quick turnaround, yeah.

Sabina

I mean, they did try to save it by introducing these security features. In late 2020, I think they announced that they were planning to roll out sort of verification for users, as well as this firewall protected app builder, apparently, but yeah, then ultimately, it became, I think we abandoned the external message invites, like, completely in early 2021. In March.

Keumars

You've essentially just described how email works anyway, though. I mean, anyone could set up an email account and message anyone's publicly available email address with anything they want. And often, there's no verification at all. You'll get abuse, harassment, and all sorts of unwanted messages. I'm, to some extent, I'm playing devil's advocate here, because I don't think that's great, either. But it's, it's curious to me how thinking back, Slack faced such heavy backlash over this, when essentially, they were trying to replicate a feature that's been around since email was invented. And I'm wondering, I guess why that happened, why people didn't kind of connect the dots in a way, but also what that says about email.

Adam

Well, one of the big problems with that Slack feature in particular is because the, so how it would work is you would get an email, essentially, in your inbox saying, oh, you know, so and so wants to invite you to collaborate on Slack and you could add a little, a little note to that request. And there was no filtering on the the notes. So the note to kind of connect on Slack, could say whatever, regardless of how kind of, you know, violent or abusive or whatever it it was and because these invites were landing in people's inboxes from a generic Slack email address, you know, the whole kind of like, no reply, you know, automated email sender type things, there's no way to, to block it, really. Whereas if it's someone just, you know, emailing you from their email account, even if it's a disposable burner account, you can block that sender. And then, you know, they, you know, at the very least they had to set up a new account to keep emailing you. So that was one of the kind of the big issues, but I do sort of see what you mean Keumars, in terms of it does make you kind of reassess some of the kind of inherent issues of email that we've all just kind of, I guess, learn to live with, you know, because it's been normal thing.

Keumars

We've priced it in.

Adam

Yeah. We're just sort of used to it.

Sabina

I mean, it's interesting that this got such a, such sort of like massive backlash. And yet, you know, it wasn't even - I mean, maybe I'm just like, comparing apples to oranges - but this isn't even like a fraction of how bad the zoom-bombing issues were.

Adam

Oh, yeah.

Sabina

So that was, that was really bad. I think it took like months to fix. So you know, that was like, dominated sort of like headlines, like, during the first months of the pandemic, of like, how people were getting, they were getting bombarded by porn, and some really, you know, awful stuff. And yeah, and that took, like, ages to fix.

Adam

And that kind of stuff was still happening, even as recently as, you know, this year, there was something I think in January, with the Italian Senate. And it does kind of, it does illustrate that there are still... for want of a better word, there's still kinks to be worked out with the with the setup.

Sabina

Yeah, I think it was even, I think there was some, you know, pretty significant court proceedings, which were also, you know, subject to some Zoom-bombing.

Keumars

I remember that.

Adam

So given how heavily companies have invested in platforms like Zoom, and Slack, both in terms of the kind of financial investment, but also just the time it takes to set up and kind of roll these out. They're great for internal collaboration. They're fabulous for letting employees talk to each other, more efficient collaboration between teams. You know, we've talked about that, at length, both on this show and on the site in general. But what is kind of stopping them from crossing that gap into letting companies communicate with other, other organisations and other partners?

Keumars

I suppose for me, the thing is all about interoperability, right? So you might have 10 different businesses with 12 different platforms, and some might be compatible. Some might not be, whereas email is pretty universal, isn't it? I mean, doesn't matter which provider you're using, you can get in touch with anyone you want.

Sabina

Yeah, you're totally right. I think, I think especially the pandemic and has, has, like, caused this sort of, like pressure that, you know, obviously, sort of, like, it's great that there are like, so many new platforms to, to conduct business on whether it's, you know, video conferencing or emails or you know, or instant messaging. But then also, we also have, we face this, face this pressure to be available on all of these platforms, and to check these platforms and, you know, okay, maybe not Zoom, but like, you know, there's email, there's like WhatsApp, there's, like, you know, all of these different different platforms to be, you know, that we are expected to be constantly available on and, and, you know, in case we miss a significant business opportunity, for example, and, you know, I just, it's, it's not great. I think that's basically we're just, teah, we're just hopping through apps throughout our whole life. Like it's, it's, you know, there's nothing it's, it's really exhausting, honestly, and, and, and yeah, and I wish there was just like, one app, where everything was done.

Adam

Well, that's, that's the thing. I think, the key difference for me, between email and these kind of newer collaboration platforms, is that email was developed, you know, really back in the back in the 70s and 80s. And it was developed by researchers and academics. And it was developed as an open standard, that people then built kind of proprietary clients on top of, it wasn't built as a kind of walled garden enclosure where you had to be, you had to be on one specific platform in order to use it. And I think that's why it's persisted so much; that openness means that it is, you know, it doesn't matter what email client you're using, you know. If, if email was developed today, if I, you know, if I was on Gmail, I probably wouldn't be able to email someone that was using Outlook.

Sabina

Yes, that is a very good point. Yeah, I think, I never thought of this. I think it's, you know, I think we're very lucky to have this. And I just hope that in the next 10 years, this won't be rolled back. You know, because I can see this, this being a potential to gatekeep like, by tech giants, but yeah, I really, I really hope that's not the case.

Keumars

It's the way of the world, isn't it? You were mentioning to me, Adam, the the way the metaverse is developing now, which is, if you if you like, the next frontier of all this nonsense. In a sense, it's totally, you know, to borrow your phrase, wall-gardened, everything is inaccessible. If you want to hop from from one Metaverse to another, I mean, it's, they're not highly developed yet, but you can't imagine anything like that with regards to email.

Adam

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I think we should just bring back IRC. I think that would solve a lot of these problems.

Sabina

What is that?

Adam

Just I mean... Oh, there's, I would imagine a good 40%, at least, of our audience has just winced. IRC is a technology from from the olden times; it was essentially the the first kind of, the first real instant messaging service. And it was based on this, this kind of open principle, the the IRC kind of protocols were, you know, the underlying fabric that people then built clients on top of, it was essentially, if you're familiar with kind of MSN Messenger, or AOL or anything like that, it was that kind of thing. But it was, it was very kind of widespread. And, you know, I think there's, there's a lot to, there's a lot to say, for IRC as a kind of as a protocol. And I think, moving things like Slack and Teams, and all the rest of it, to have IRC kind of underneath them, and linking them together - I think that would just be a better, a better way to do things for everyone. So, on that subject, then, do you ever think that we'll see email going away? Do you think we could conceivably see it replaced by a newer or more convenient technology?

Sabina

I hope not. I think it will be ultimately. And I think we'll, I don't know, maybe in 20 years, we'll be forced to conduct you know, any sort of like, inter-company communication through like the metaverse.

Adam

Oh god. Horrifying thought.

Sabina

Yeah. It's, it's scary. And I don't know, I really hope it doesn't. I feel like especially, you know, I think I spend most of my week, if not life, writing, and for me, email is most natural. You know, it's, it's, it's written communication. And, and I hope we don't have to, you know, completely abandon that in favour of some kind of new... Like, I don't know, like, can you imagine if, if email was completely replaced by video conferencing? Can you like record a message by bit? Yeah. Or even like, yeah, it's just, it's insane. It's...

Keumars

Yeah, shut it down.

Adam

Yeah, yeah. Imagine if it was all voice notes. If like written messages just went away.

Sabina

I do see that trend. Definitely. I think I think I would just retire. I think, no, absolutely not.

Keumars

I strive to keep communication as limited as possible in my life, at all points. So I would, I would find that horrifying. Absolutely horrifying.

Adam

Yeah. I mean, it does solve the problem of it being very hard to read tone over text. But yeah, I'm inclined to agree if, if it was all voice notes, I would just roll out the window, I think.

Sabina

Yeah, no, absolutely not.

Keumars

I have flashbacks to redoing a voice message on an answering machine about 10 times before I was happy with the way I sounded. I mean, talk about productivity. I think I might spend a day doing voice notes.

Adam

Yeah. Like, no have to have to redo it,

Sabina

I think you should be very happy that you're in a relationship, because a lot of dating apps are rolling out voice messages right now.

Keumars

I was not aware of this.

Sabina

Yep. Hinge makes you, it like almost forces you to add a voice note to your profile so that people can hear your voice. And then people also send you voice notes as well. Like, if they want to say something to you, it's absolutely horrendous.

Adam

We we should go back to doing all of our communication with long form emails.

Keumars

I'd go one further, I think we should all just write letters to each other. I think it would slow things down quite nicely, I think, you know, give each other more time to think and more time to process information. And, you know, if we really, really want to talk to someone, then we'll have to write a letter.

Sabina

Yeah, I would really like to receive any PR, like message or sort of like business offer by sitting on my front porch with some iced tea and someone rolling up on a horse and giving me, yeah, and handing me a handwritten letter from pitching, you know, whatever interview they want. So, this is how I imagine how it would be in a perfect world.

Adam

Yeah, I want all my press releases to arrive on a scroll with a wax seal. Yeah. Preferably delivered by a bugler.

Keumars

Well, you see, you say this, someone's going to hear it. And you know, two weeks down the line, you never know, you might be surprised.

Adam

Well, unfortunately, I'm afraid that's all we've got time for on this week's episode, but you can find links to everything we've spoken about today in the show notes, and even more on our website, itpro.co.uk.

Keumars

Don't forget to subscribe to our social media and YouTube channel for more great content and leave the podcast a rating and a review.

Sabina

We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT. But until then, goodbye.

Adam

Bye.

Keumars

Bye.

It seems that in the world of modern IT, you can’t swing a cat-6 cable without hitting four or five cloud-based platforms that are trying to revolutionise business communication. Despite the rise of platforms like Slack, Teams, Zoom and more, however, emails remain by far the most widely-used method of professional communication.

In this week’s episode, we take a look at why this comparatively ancient technology still persists so widely, as well as the advantages that it offers over newer platforms, and what inspiration they can take from it.

Highlights

“What it comes down to for me is - and I've been thinking about this, because I hate email, and I want it to die - but I think it serves a very important purpose in the sense that it's a medium where a lot of people who are going to try to communicate with me only live there; they're not bleeding into places like WhatsApp or whatever platform you might choose to speak to your contacts and so on. It's a very useful way of keeping people at arm's length, to some extent.”

“I think the key difference between email and these newer collaboration platforms for me, is that email was developed back in the 70s and 80s. And it was developed by researchers and academics as an open standard, that people then built proprietary clients on top of. It wasn't built as a walled garden enclosure where you had to be on one specific platform in order to use it. And I think that's why it's persisted so much; that openness means that it doesn't matter what email client you're using. If email was developed today, if I was on Gmail, I probably wouldn't be able to email someone that was using Outlook.”

“I would really like to receive any PR message or business offer by sitting on my front porch with some iced tea and someone rolling up on a horse and handing me a handwritten letter pitching whatever interview they want. This is how I imagine it would be in a perfect world.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• In the end, email might actually kill off Slack
• Managing the oversaturation of workplace platforms
• Microsoft declares Slack isn't secure enough for its workers
• Slack plots 'enterprise-grade' security updates for Slack Connect
• Email is killing productivity, new research finds
• Zoom settles $85 million lawsuit over 'zoombombing', privacy policies
• The dangers of nighttime Slacking
• Working from home has created an "overtime epidemic"
• The IT Pro Podcast: Everyone needs Kubernetes certs
• The metaverse is a waste of time, effort and processing power
• How to give your business a voice
• Four ways the cloud facilitates workplace collaboration
• A new age of collaboration tools
• The social impact of remote collaboration
• Google and Microsoft's hybrid work battle shows the narrative is just as important as the technology
• IT Pro Panel: Why collaboration platforms are so hard to deploy
• How CIOs can build effective cross-business collaboration

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Google has announced a new Gmail layout that changes how Chat, Meet and Spaces are integrated with the service.

The new 'integrated view' makes it so that the messaging apps are no longer little windows floating alongside emails by giving each one its own screen, accessed via larger buttons on the left-hand side.

All Google Workspace users - except those on Workspace Essentials - will be moved to the new interface. Users can choose to switch to this new look on 8 February, with an option to switch back still available.

However, the new layout will become the default option by April and, eventually, the only option by the end of the second quarter of 2022.

With the application buttons tucked away to the left, the changes give Gmail a similar look to Microsoft's Outlook. The new app position removes the need for users to switch between tabs or windows in order to use Chat or Meets because they can now use them directly in the same browser window.

There will also be notification bubbles for each app and, soon, Google will also offer a 'unified' search function so that it shows results from all integrated applications.

The refreshed interface is a win for those that like data density and having all their work apps in one place. However, it could be a little confusing having multiple app notifications all going off in one window, potentially adding more stress to those looking to focus on one task at a time.

Whether the changes are agreeable or not, users may have suspected they were coming, given the changes Google has made to Workspace (formally G Suite) during the pandemic. The company has sought to make its platform more conducive to hybrid and remote working by tweaking the way various elements work with one another, with the rebrand to Workspace, itself, also a nod to greater integration and ease of use.

The significant majority (92%) of IT professionals use the same password across multiple sites, and over half share passwords with colleagues over email.

That's according to the findings of a survey carried out by password manager firm Bitwarden, which polled over 400 US IT decision-makers across a wide range of industries on their workplace password practices and perceptions about password security.

The research found that 53% of IT professionals share passwords with colleagues over email, while 41% share via chat and 31% during in-person conversations. More than half of respondents (53%) use computer methods to remember passwords and nearly one in three (29%) rely on pen and paper.

Bitwarden CEO Michael Crandell said that “everyone knows sharing passwords via email isn’t a great idea, and yet it’s still happening."

He added: “Ultimately, the C-Suite should prioritize finding better ways to do business faster and safely. It will set a positive tone and alleviate some of the security anxieties that are so clearly present."

The survey attributed the increasing amount of password sharing to a sudden adjustment to remote work and an increased rate of employee turnover.

More than half (54%) of IT decision-makers surveyed admitted their organization has experienced a cyber attack. Two-thirds of organizations have a ransomware mitigation strategy in place, while 25% do not have one or are not sure.

Almost two-thirds (61%) of respondents are “more concerned” about cyber security this year and attribute this heightened worry to the fear that employees working remotely may be lax about their overall security hygiene.

The report also found that nearly half of respondents (48%) are working more hours than last year, with respondents citing turnover and difficulty hiring as the primary culprits.

Both employees and IT decision-makers still resort to using shadow IT, with 30% of respondents admitted that they find themselves resorting to shadow IT as a workaround. When asked why, 63% believed it made daily activities faster and more efficient, while 48% said they used shadow IT because they lacked authorization for certain applications or software. Almost 40% of respondents said using shadow IT was down to slow response times from IT.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), a standard for visually proving an email’s legitimacy, got a boost today with the launch of a new automation tool from email security company Valimail and official support from Google.

Launched as a formal specification in 2019, BIMI is a standard that lets companies define what marketing image is displayed next to emails sent from their servers. This image, which the BIMI working group calls a “brand assertation,” serves as visual proof that the message is authentic.

BIMI uses DNS records to define the image, and it also relies on the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Performance (DMARC) standard, which helps protect against phishing. This, in turn, relies on two other technologies: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).

DMARC and its underlying technologies help to prevent email spoofing, in which phishing attackers fake a sender’s domain in an email’s “From:” field. DMARC enables administrators to publish their policy for authenticating and rejecting emails.

When a DMARC-supporting email server receives an email, it uses DNS to look up the DMARC record for the alleged sender's domain. It then checks the mail's DKIM digital certificate to ensure it matches the alleged sender's DKIM certificate. It also verifies the message came from IP addresses listed in the SPF record.

While not a security solution, BIMI uses these technologies to verify the image attached to an email is really from the sender.

An incoming email server uses DMARC to authenticate the message. If the email passes the DMARC authentication, the email server uses DNS to retrieve the sender's BIMI image. The BIMI image then shows up next to the company's name in emails.

Boosting its legitimacy, BIMI also got official support from Google following a year-long pilot project. The company will now officially support BIMI in Gmail, according to the AuthIndicators Working Group, which manages the BIMI effort.

This official acceptance by Google means for an organization's logo to be eligible for display in Gmail, a brand must obtain a BIMI certificate confirming its right to use the image. These certificates are tied to registered trademarks from select jurisdictions.

Several other companies also support BIMI in pilot mode, including Yahoo!, AOL, Netscape, and Fastmail. Comcast was also planning BIMI support as of last October. Microsoft, however, still has not signed on to the program.

To help streamline this process, email security company Valimail, which claims to have “founded, named, and resourced the BIMI standard,” announced Amplify, a tool that automates BIMI support. With Amplify’s release, Valimain looks to make BIMI the baseline for all email security.

Along with the new product, Valimail debuted partnerships with certificate providers DigiCert and Entrust to develop BIMI further and create a straightforward process for companies to enforce DMARC and Verified Mark Certificate (VMC).

The Labour Party has called for a full investigation into the ministerial use of private email accounts for government business.

It follows a report in The Sunday Times that suggests that former health secretary, Matt Hancock, breached government guidelines by using his personal Gmail account.

Angela Rayner, Labour's deputy leader, has written to the Cabinet Secretary and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) demanding a "full-scale investigation" into what she called a "shady practice" that could "conceal vital information". Rayner has warned that "the buck doesn't stop with Hancock" and that the government was "rotten to its core".

"We need to know how wide this goes and how much government business is being conducted in secret," Rayner wrote. "This shady practice has the potential to conceal vital information of public interest and cover up the waste of taxpayers money that has been given to friends of Conservative ministers."

The Sunday Times said it had seen documents that suggested Hancock had "routinely" used his private Gmail account to conduct government business and also claimed that the junior health minister, Lord Bethell, did the same. There are also claims the other officials within the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) had breached government guidelines in this way.

Labour's concern is that, as a result of this private email use, the government does not have a complete record of the former health secretary's decision-making during the pandemic, which includes the procurement of PPE, set up of the Test and Trace system and the strategy for care homes.

In a statement given to IT Pro, the UK's Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, said: "It is an important principle of government transparency and accountability that official records are kept of key actions and decision.

"The issue of ministers and senior officials using private email accounts to conduct sensitive official business is a concerning one for the public and is one my office has advised on before. I am looking carefully at the information that has come to light over the past few days and considering what further steps may be necessary to address the concerns raised with me."

Hancock resigned over the weekend following leaked CCTV footage from his office that shows him in an embrace with his aide Gina Coladangelo. The ICO also confirmed that it is making enquiries into the release of personal data to the media and whether a further regulatory response is warranted.

The former health secretary is also under scrutiny from the Conservative Party; when asked by the BBC if Hancock's actions were a security issue, justice secretary Robert Buckland said: "I agree, and that's why I think it's important that we use the systems that we are provided with."

In response to Buckland's comments, Rayner tweeted: "We already know that hostile states target minister's email accounts to access sensitive information and even blackmail Ministers. Tory ministers are putting our national security at risk by trying to hide from the public and cover up their dodgy dealings."

Using a personal personal account for government business is meant to be against government guidelines, but in April, MP Tom Tugendhat claimed that GCHQ had advised him that Gmail was safer than the system used in Parliament.

When compared to more modern video conferencing and collaboration platforms such as Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, email can easily be dismissed as outdated and inconvenient. Nevertheless, it’s still considered the most commonly-used form of business communication, especially when contacting individuals from outside of your organisation. After all, it requires minimal internet connection and, as opposed to the immediacy of video calls, email etiquette allows users to open messages whenever it’s most convenient to them, leading to a better work-life balance.

However, as one of the more traditional systems of communication that hasn’t changed much over the past decade, email is also the perfect target for cyber criminals looking to gain easy access to an organisation’s data.

Despite plenty of email providers rolling out extra security features such as CAPTCHA verification tests, hackers always come prepared. In a recent case, attackers were spotted sending out phishing emails attached as HTML files that looked clean to a secure email gateway. When a victim opens the HTML file containing a CAPTCHA and solves it, the browser will then show them a phishing page asking them to enter their credentials.

In a cyber landscape where no one can feel truly safe, there are ways to mitigate the threat of having your email account compromised by threat actors. This includes selecting an email service provider that comes equipped with additional security features designed to prevent hackers from gaining access to your inbox. In this guide, we compare communication offerings based on price, storage, and features, allowing you to choose the best secure email service for your business.

What to look for in a secure email service

Whether you’re a home user or work for a large corporation, it’s good to know what security features your email service has. Below, you’ll find some features you should look for in secure email service and how they may benefit you.

End-to-end encryption

End-to-end encryption disguises data in order to prevent it from being read or changed, and sending an email over this secure communication system means only the device it’s sent to can decrypt it, with the use of a private decryption key.

This method is considered one of the safest because it prevents third parties from being able to access the secure file while it’s being transferred within the end-to-end system.

PGP encryption

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is seen as a fairly standard encryption service, but it’s extremely difficult to hack. This is a key reason why this email security tool is still used today, using a combination of data compression, private-key and public-key cryptography, since its conception in 1991.

The way it works is that each user of this system has an encryption key that is known publicly; this changes the contents of a secure text file or email into a complex code of characters. This code is then sent to the recipient who uses their private PGP encryption key to turn the characters back into a readable message.

Without access to the public and private encryption keys, others won’t be able to read the contents.

Two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, is a protective feature that means that in order to read a secure message or email, the recipient needs a password or code that’s sent to them to decrypt it; this can either be by text message or an authenticator app on your phone.

With this method, businesses can enable their employees to access messages from wherever they are, and decrease the chances for hackers to gain access without the authentication passwords.

Server location

An email server’s location has a bearing on how secure it is. Countries like the US and UK share intelligence data about citizens, and this data can be collected from servers based in those countries.

Other countries — Germany and Switzerland, for example — have tougher privacy laws, so many secure email services are based there to prevent snooping.

What secure email services are available?

There are plenty of secure email services available. Here are six of the most secure options.

ProtonMail

URL: www.protonmail.com

Price: From £0 up to £6.83 (€8.00 / $9.45) per user per month

Storage: 500MB - 20GB

One of the world’s largest secure email services, ProtonMail offers end-to-end encryption and a raft of other security features, such as encryption via secure implementations of AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), RSA, and OpenPGP.

You can also send end-to-end encrypted emails to non-ProtonMail users by sending the recipient a link that displays the encrypted message on their browser. You can then share a passphrase with the recipient to decrypt the message.

The company says it can’t read any emails it hosts because the data is encrypted so it’s inaccessible to the provider. The provider can’t decrypt the data either, so it can’t hand it over to third parties.

Plus, it’s based in Switzerland, which has some of the world’s strictest privacy laws. It also has a no-logs policy and offers self-destructing emails.

Tutanota

URL: www.tutanota.com

Price: From £0 to £4.10 (€4.80 / $5.67) per user per month

Included storage: 1GB - 10GB

Paid storage: Up to 1TB at £51.24 (€60.00 / $70.89) per month

This Germany-based secure email service provider offers a GDPR-compliant email service with built-in encryption and a secure calendar that allows no one but you to see your appointments. It also has desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux and mobile apps for iOS and Android.

It uses AES-128 symmetric encryption or RSA-2048 asymmetric encryption, depending on the email recipient. The service also obfuscates email subject lines and attachment names.

Other security features include end-to-end encrypted mailbox, end-to-end encrypted address book, automatic end-to-end encrypted emails between users, end-to-end encrypted emails to any email address via a password.

It also has a secure password reset that gives the company no access at all. Users can execute a full-text search of encrypted data locally. There is also TLS with support for PFS, DMARC, DKIM, DNSSEC, MTA-STS.

MailFence

URL: www.mailfence.com/en/

Price: From £0 to £21.35 (€25 / $29.54) per month

Storage: 500MB - 50GB

MailFence is encrypted with a secure, open-source implementation of OpenPGP and offers cloud-based calendar, contact, and document tools. Existing PGP users can also import and manage their keypairs in the app.

It offers end-to-end encryption and digital signatures with data stored on Belgian servers. Customers can send encrypted messages to users who don’t use PGP. It also offers SSL/TLS, Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), MTA-STS, and HSTS for protecting your data while in motion.

This Belgium-based secure email service donates 15% of the Pro and Ultra plans revenues to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the European Digital Rights Foundation.

Hushmail

URL: www.hushmail.com

Price: £36.13 (€42.30 / $49.98) [personal account per year]; £4.33 (€5.07 / $5.99) per user per month [small businesses]; £7.22 - £28.19 (€8.46 - €33.01 / $9.99 - $39.00 per month [health care]; (€8.46 / $9.99) per month [law]; and £2.88 (€3.38 / $3.99) per user per month [non-profits]

Storage: 10GB (personal, small business, law); 10-15GB per user (health care); and 10GB per user (non-profits)

Hushmail offers end-to-end encryption using open-source OpenPGP, but subject lines are unencrypted. User passwords are also hashed, and Hushmail uses a zero-knowledge model. Plus, the company can’t decrypt emails without a password.

However, if the provider gets an enforceable order under British Columbia law, they’ll have to reveal data in an unencrypted format.

Mailbox.org

URL: www.mailbox.org/en/

Price: £0.85 (€1.00 / $1.18) per month to £7.69 (€9.00 / $10.63) per user per month

Storage: 2 GB- 25GB (50GB cloud storage)

Mailbox.org is a Germany-based secure email provider and is compatible with mobile devices and third-party clients. Mailbox.org also offers cloud storage and secure video conferencing features.

The service allows users to register anonymously without having to enter any personal details. SSL/TLS encryption protects data transmission, and it uses full PGP encryption. Users can choose to prevent sending mail to recipients without secure mailboxes.

The provider also uses (EC)DHE algorithms for Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), which prevents any possible decryption of recorded data traffic in the future. Mailbox.org secures its domain with DNSSEC and DANE/TLSA and uses HSTS, CAA, CSP, MTA-STS, and X-XSS to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks (MitM).

Posteo

URL: www.posteo.de/en

Price: £0.85 (€1 / $1.18) per month

Storage: 2GB

Paid storage: £0.21 (€0.25 / $0.30) per month per additional GB (up to 20GB)

Posteo works on any device to enable cross-platform synchronization and includes spam and anti-virus filters. Plus, it strips identifying IP addresses from all emails. Users can sign up for and pay for the service anonymously. The firm is headquartered in Berlin, Germany, where it has been running since 2009.

Posteo also uses TLS with Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), DANE/TLSA, HTTP Strict Transport Security HSTS, SSH

Its servers’ hard disks are AES encrypted to prohibit data theft and unauthorized access and are in a highly secure German data center. There is also optional on-server email encryption with RSA, AES, HMAC, and bcrypt hashing.

Emails sent using Posteo’s webmail interface contain neither a user's local nor public IP address. Users can secure Posteo accounts with two-factor authentication and set it up on all devices with free apps.

A network driver problem resulted in some users being unable to access their Exchange Online mailboxes on Microsoft 365 for approximately 12 hours.

In a tweet on 5 November at 8.13PM, Microsoft said that it was investigating an issue “wherein some users may be unable to access their mailboxes through Exchange Online via all connection methods”.

Around an hour later, it discovered that a recent service update to a portion of its infrastructure was “causing impact to mailbox access via Exchange Online from any connection method”. It then identified a network driver issue as the underlying cause of the outage.

However, in the early morning on 6 November, Microsoft admitted that the fix was “taking longer than anticipated”.

“Concurrently, we’re narrowing down alternate mitigation options for faster relief to customers.”

It was another two hours after that tweet when Microsoft finally found a solution and began rolling out a fix. It was only until three hours ago at the time of writing that Microsoft finally confirmed that the initial problem had been fixed for all users.

Just over a month ago, Microsoft suffered a global outage leaving users being unable to access their Outlook accounts. As reported by Cloud Pro, Microsoft blamed that outage on a configuration update to components that route user requests. This led to the company “reverting” the update and monitoring the service to ensure it came back up again.

This outage was the second in a week for Microsoft following an issue that caused Azure, Outlook, Office, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams to be down for around five hours.

There is something inherently ignorable about an email. Ray Tomlinson sent the first one (to himself) in 1971 but he can’t remember what the subject was.

Email is not particularly cool either; it’s a Gen-X invention that Millennials and Gen-Zs are consistently trying to move away from with platforms like Slack, which is hellbent on killing it off.

Slack doesn’t make any attempt to hide this contempt for email, either. Recently it added a feature to send messages beyond the walls of a company and connect organisations into shared channels. Unfortunately for email, most businesses want these instant cloud-based communications. Not some legacy tech where you can accidentally ‘cc’ in all your contacts.

Yet for some time there has been a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs and startups that still see value in email in the golden age of cloud computing. They see an opportunity to feed that cloud-based innovation into your inbox and breathe new life into this founding pillar of the Digital Age. Simply put, the innovations that Slack has built to kill email off have, ironically, inspired others to improve it.

The inbox revolution

In the middle of 2019, a New York Times article drew attention to a startup that promised to revolutionise emails with machine learning-based shortcuts. It was a Gmail plugin called Superhuman that reportedly had an ever expanding waiting list of potential clients, all keen to pay a $30 (£22.8) a month premium for email.

The company borrows Gmail creator Paul Buchheit’s rule of “every interaction should be faster than 100ms”. It has developed features that it says will “make you feel superhuman”, such as an AI-based email triage (which is actually just a suped up filter), an undo send capability, message scheduling and a few more that sound like very mundane superpowers.

Productivity expert, author and founder of career advice site The Muse, Alexandra Cavoulacos points out that Superhuman is the newest in a long line of startups that claim to improve email. She gave its plugin a go, along with a rival service called Hey (you may have seen it battling Apple in the news).

“Few have been successful in the long-term, but many have had early user growth and interest,” Cavoulacos explains. “What that indicates to me is that there is a real demand for an improved product. We spend so much time in email that something that has a better user experience or saves you time can be very valuable.

“We are very used to our existing tools, so the new options have to be that much better to be worth switching – even more so for paid products. Superhuman has focused on speed and shortcuts, quite successfully – when I tested them out I definitely saw better speeds and enjoyed a number of their features. Hey seems to be focusing more on being a better filter – keeping just anyone from taking up your time, mental energy and inbox real estate.”

While apps like Slack have a lot of upsides, Cavoulacos still believes that email has an important role in the modern age and she suggests that instant message platforms have facilitated a move to an immediate response model. And, while there is certainly work that is best done via platforms that focus on real-time collaboration and instant messaging, the more private affair of email still has its place in 2020 and beyond.

“Email is still the best tool for thoughtful asynchronous communication, which is critical for allowing individuals to control when and how they do their work,” Cavoulacos says. “It is already challenging enough to keep your inbox from becoming your to-do list, with every email becoming a new task for you to do. Add in Slack or other app notifications, and professionals find themselves busy all day, but not productive.”

Collaboration loops

Like Superhuman and Hey, Boštjan Bregar, the CEO and co-founder of Loop, believes that innovations in cloud-based communications and instant collaboration tools can be imported to your inbox. Bregar has been in the collaboration space for many years but didn't start with email. In 2016, angel investor and long-term collaborator Ben White suggested he should stop thinking about new, alternative email platforms and instead look at adding collaboration into something already in use. Whereas Slack and Microsoft Teams talk about killing off email, White and Bregar decided to go against the grain to try and modernise it.

“There are about three or four players that are really trying to sort of reinvented email - Dropbox just entered the market a few weeks ago with their solution,” Bregar explains. “So there are quite a few people now figuring out that maybe the solution is not bringing people out of email, but actually bringing all the new stuff into it.”

Loop connects to your existing email structure, whoever the provider may be, and floods it with various shortcuts and efficiency add-ons. It works as an individual performance boost or as a company-wide collaboration tool similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams. For example, when an email comes through that is perhaps more relevant to someone else in your team, rather than cc them in another message, you can @ them, or @ your whole team, and find the right person. From there, documents, resources and anything else required can be pulled in for more instant collaboration between you, your team and also the sender.

However, as seamless as that sounds, it adds to the concerns raised by Cavoulacos about “always-on” culture where the lines between work and life can blur – something that may have been exacerbated for home workers by the pandemic. So, letting the rest of your team, or the world, know you’re currently reading emails may take away that intimacy.

Bregar doesn’t see it that way, however. In fact, quite the opposite. “It is such an individual tool,” he says. “You're on your own when you're in your inbox, you don't feel there's anybody else in there. If you use Slack, you feel there are other people there. Any tool you take today that has been put onto the market in the last 10 years, you have this feeling that you're sort of together. Whereas within the inbox, it's yours.

“The challenge is how to preserve this ability to be on your own and be effective in doing your stuff while feeling that you have your team there to help you because otherwise, you have to switch between platforms.”

For now, at least, email seems here to stay as it still remains one of the most effective ways to communicate outside your organisation. With add-ons for easier collaboration that imitate what instant messaging-focused platforms offer, maybe it really will be email that triumphs after all.

We’ve all experienced that sinking feeling after accidentally sending an email to the wrong recipient. If it’s an internal message, you may still be able to recall it – but if it’s gone to someone outside of your company there may be nothing you can do. At best, it’s an embarrassment; at worst, if your message contained confidential or personal information, you could be looking at a hefty fine.

SafeSend Email Security is a small add-in for Outlook that’s designed to eliminate that risk. It achieves this partly by requiring users to review all external email recipients and confirm that they’re correct before the message can be released.

There’s a lot more than this to the software, however. It also provides extensive data loss prevention (DLP) services, allowing you to scan email subjects, message contents and attachments for specific keywords and patterns. If a match is found, the software can request confirmation before sending or even block transmission altogether.

Deployment is a cinch. The add-in can either be installed manually or distributed and managed centrally using a group policy. It works with all versions of Outlook from 2007 upwards, and there’s also a web version for Outlook 365 and OWA. We had no problems using a GPO to distribute the MSI package to the Windows clients in our lab: once they had logged into the domain and been authenticated, the add-in was silently deployed without the need for any user interaction.

Training requirements are minimal. Users just need to be advised that the first time they load Outlook, SafeSend will pop up a message to confirm their internal email domain. Once this is done, any attempt to send a message outside of the organisation will bring up a confirmation prompt.

That might sound a little intrusive, but the dialog is clean and simple, showing all the email’s recipients (including those in the “Cc:” field) with a tickbox next to each one. If something’s not right, you can remove any unwanted recipients before sending, or reopen the message for further editing.

Central management is just as easy. SafeSend provides ADMX/ADML files for deployment on your domain controller; with these copied across to the PolicyDefinations folder on our Active Directory server, we were able to create a customised SafeSend GPO for all authenticated users.

This process can be a little time-consuming, but that’s only because the SafeSend GPO has over 150 options to configure. Some of these are simple controls, such as preventing users from removing SafeSend, adding extra safe domains and deciding whether to enable the “Select All” tickbox. More advanced options let you do things such as limiting the number of message recipients, detecting bulk emails and adding custom footer messages.

In addition, you can, of course, customise SafeSend’s DLP policies. These are extremely versatile as you can create multiple rules to detect specific strings, credit card numbers and even regular expressions. To ensure nothing slips through the net, SafeSend scans not only the text of outgoing emails but also attachments in various formats, including PDFs, Office attachments and ZIP archives.

If a user’s email triggers one of your DLP rules, they’ll be presented with details of the sensitive content and the detection rules that it triggered. You can set a custom action for each rule, so for some types of data you could require explicit confirmation from the sender, while other content might be completely blocked.

SafeSend also gives you the option of adding X-headers to emails. These can be used to trigger encryption using a separate security product such as Mimecast and Proofpoint – or you can use X-headers in conjunction with Exchange transport rules to verify that users have SafeSend installed.

We found SafeSend simple to roll out and refreshingly easy to manage. In these days when an accidental data breach can expose you to steep fines, every SMB ought to be concerned about email security – and this add-in is a great solution.

Modern customers crave memorable personalised experiences. That’s why 83% of the marketers we asked in our recent survey – carried out in association with the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) – have increased their personalisation budget in 2019, with 32% pointing to a “significant budget increase.”

Money helps – but it can’t slingshot you all the way to personalisation perfection. In the same survey, we also discovered a number of barriers to personalisation – many of which can only be resolved by adapting the culture of the organisation you work for step-by-step, day-by-day.

This whitepaper sets out the 5 main barriers modern marketers are facing, exploring the origin of each problem and how they can be overcome.

How many times have you sat down and crafted a fantastic email only to find yourself staring at a blinking cursor trying to decide the best way to sign off? Those moments between deciding how to sign off an email and actually hitting “Send” can be treacherous. Do you go all-in with the formalities or take a decidedly friendlier tone?

Before diving into the specifics, let’s start with the basics.

What is an email signoff?

An email signoff is a small bit of text people add at the end of the email before they type their name. These last few words not only set expectations moving forward, but they also define the relationship between the sender and recipient.

The most common ways to sign off an email include:

• “All the best”
• “My regards”
• “Respectfully”
• “Many thanks”

What makes your email signoff important?

An email closing is the last thing your recipient reads. It can elicit a quick response when done correctly or result in no response at all if done incorrectly.

Imagine meeting a new business contact at a networking event and spending a few minutes getting to know them. Once your conversation ends, you wouldn’t just turn around and walk away without saying goodbye, would you?

Of course you wouldn’t. Not only would that be incredibly rude, but it would also leave a bad impression and likely prevent future discussions with that individual. Instead, you would probably say something along the lines of, “It was great meeting you. Please take my business card. I hope to hear from you soon.”

When you sign off an email, think of it as the end of a conversation. By using friendly, polite and professional language and ending your message with a clear call to action, you have a better chance of getting a positive response and continuing conversations.

What should you include when you sign off an email?

There are multiple parts to an email closing. The signoff itself is important, but there are additional pieces of information you should also include before hitting “Send.”

Always remember to include the following in your email signoff:

• Full name: Be sure to include your first and last name to avoid any confusion and give the recipient an understanding of who they are corresponding with.
• Title and company: Include your current job title and company, particularly if you find yourself emailing with someone outside the company you work for.
• Contact information: Sure, the recipient has your email address, but are there other ways they can contact you? It can be useful to include your phone number and even your LinkedIn profile URL.

How to sign off an email with class

There are many tried-and-true email signoffs you can use the next time you sit down to send an email to a coworker or friend. These signoffs can range from your typical “Best” to the classic “Sincerely.” Those aren’t the only ways to sign off an email, though.

Formal email signoffs

In a formal business situation, you want to use an email signoff that'll show your professionalism without sounding too stuffy. Some examples of great professional email signoffs include:

• Regards: It might come off as a bit cold, but it works in professional emails because there’s nothing unexpected about sending your regards to professional contacts.
• Sincerely: While it would sound stuffy in a more casual business email, “Sincerely” is the ideal email signoff for corresponding with a new connection.
• Best wishes: This signoff strikes the perfect balance between friendliness and formalness, making it a safe bet for any correspondence.

Informal email signoffs

If you're emailing a coworker or client you're friendly with, a more casual email signoff may be appropriate. Some examples of casual business email signoffs include:

• Cheers: It’s 5 o’clock somewhere! While this signoff works well if your email is a conversational one, it can come off as unprofessional in certain settings.
• Best: You can use “Best” to share your best wishes in a more cheerful way. If you get a lot of emails, you’ve likely seen this one a lot.
• Talk soon: If the recipient is someone that you know and anticipate talking to in the near future, consider something as simple as ‘Talk soon.’ Not only is it as friendly as it is polite, but it also signifies that the conversation is likely to continue.

Call to action email signoff

If your email includes asking the recipient to perform a task or help you with something now or in the future, one of these email signoffs will do the trick:

• Thanks in advance: Emails that include “Thanks in advance” are more likely to get a response than those without it. Maybe it’s because this signoff expresses gratitude but also sets an expectation.
• Thank you: This one is such a classic your mother would be proud you used it. Not to mention, a simple “thank you” is always a solid choice when you want to express gratitude.
• I appreciate your [help, input, feedback, etc.]: There’s no better time than the present to express appreciation when someone has helped you.

Improper business email signoffs

There are some signoffs you may use in an email to your mom or significant other, but they simply aren't appropriate in a business email. Here are a few examples:

• Love: Does this one even need an explanation? If you find yourself emailing with a coworker or professional connection, dropping the L-word probably won’t be received well. Try “Best wishes,” instead.
• Thx: In this day and age, shortening words and using acronyms in place of full phrases can feel like second nature. Our advice? Spell things out.
• [Nothing at all.]: Ah, the good old Irish goodbye. Acceptable at parties but not at the end of an email. A simple “Best,” will do.

Things to keep in mind

Regardless of who you find yourself communicating with via email, always remember to include your first and last name in your signoff. Also, be sure to use context clues when choosing the appropriate email signoff tone.

If you’re emailing someone you’ve never met, take the tried-and-true approach of keeping things professional. If you’ve communicated before and feel a more laid-back closing is appropriate, adjust your email signoff appropriately. If you’re unsure, it’s always a good idea to err on the side of caution and sign off with a professional farewell.

Here we are on the cusp of 2020 – a date that still sounds ridiculously futuristic to me – and yet we’re still clinging to a mode of communication that was invented when the Pharaohs were knocking around Egypt.

Email should have killed off the postal service years ago. It’s certainly given it a good kicking, to be fair, but I’m still dealing with businesses that insist on communicating via ‘snail mail’ for no good reason whatsoever.

I’ve spent the past week getting quotes for a new boiler. The first company was referred to me by the very forward-thinking energy supplier Octopus, which literally changes my energy prices every half an hour in line with demand, takes all my readings via smart meters and hasn’t sent me a single piece of paper in the year I’ve been with them. The company it recommended wants to install a “smart boiler” and took a survey of my house using a Skype-like app, where the surveyor was on the other end of a video link. Yet, when it came to delivering the quotes for the job, the company said it would send them in the post – quotes, I’m still waiting for almost a week later.

The same was true of the second, more local firm, which came to price up the job. This chap spent 10 minutes talking to me about the benefits of installing a Hive smart meter, relayed stories of how one customer kept turning the heating down at home while he was sitting on a beach in Barbados, fearful that his stay-at-home kids would be running up his bill while left unsupervised, and yet he too insisted on sending the quotes in the post “because I’m a bit old-school”.

I love my accountants. Avuncular old Pete and his efficient assistant Rachel are brilliant at patiently dealing with my lifelong aversion to making money (I do words, not numbers, as I told them at our first meeting).

They finally convinced me to stop running my business on patchy Excel spreadsheets and move to the online accounting system Xero instead, which has cut the amount of time I spend on tedious admin such as invoicing and filling in VAT returns enormously. Rachel can log into Xero and correct my inevitable errors (“no, Barry, you can’t claim a six-pack of Wagon Wheels as a business expense”) and everything is submitted electronically.

And yet, every time they write to me or send me an invoice, it comes through my letterbox on bits of paper that the dog will inevitably chew, or that I won’t see under the mountains of pizza menus and appeals to save donkeys in Derbyshire.

Why is this? How can these businesses – which are selling and working with cutting-edge technologies – rely on a postal system that is woefully inefficient, more costly and less convenient for the person on the receiving end? What has trackable, searchable, instantaneous email ever done to them?

So, here’s my early resolution for the new year (which I’m still convinced is only 2006, by the way): any company that insists on using the aptly named snail mail won’t be getting my business. I’ll write to them to let them know, obviously.

You’ve doubtless read repeated warnings about how to avoid ransomware, but even the companies we think of as the good guys attempt to take hostages – your cherished email address being one of them.

People cling to their email address like their mobile phone number, because they’ve had it from way back when their computer made screeching noises every time they went online; it’s the one that all their friends have saved in their address books; and they use it for all their online accounts. Moving email address is only marginally less hassle than moving house.

The broadband providers know this all too well, which is why you’ll get stung if you try to retain a provider’s email account after you leave them. BT charges you £7.50 per month for the Premium Email service you need to keep old BT email addresses running, while TalkTalk will fleece you for a fiver each month to keep TalkTalk or Tiscali addresses active. When better-equipped webmail accounts are free, that doesn’t half hurt.

How do you avoid getting caught in this trap? My advice is to steer clear of broadband provider accounts in the first place. Gmail, Outlook and the like will probably remain free forever, and you can access them with whichever broadband provider or device you use.

The other alternative is to buy your own domain (bertjackson.co.uk, for example) and run your own email, which isn’t as expensive as you might think. The brilliant Zen Internet’s basic Bronze hosting package is £5.39 per month and that includes up to 10 email inboxes on your own domain.

A ‘.co.uk’ address costs £8.39 per year from Zen, which all added up is still cheaper than paying for BT Premium Email over the course of a year.

Whether you go down the free webmail route or buy your own domain, moving an email account is not as tricky as you’d expect. The key is preparation: don’t shut off the old account before moving to the new one, and give yourself a couple of months with both running to give you the best chance of a smooth transition.

The first step is to import the messages from your old account to the new one. Most webmail providers offer an import tool somewhere in their settings – Gmail’s can be found by clicking the Settings cog, choosing Settings and then selecting the ‘Accounts and Import’ tab. You may want to spring-clean the old account first, getting rid of any messages with huge attachments that you don’t need.

Next, you need to set up two things on your old account: a forwarder that sends all incoming messages to the new account; and an auto-reply that explains to your correspondents that you’re moving to a new address and to please update their contacts. Obviously, emails from stores such as Amazon and eBay, utility companies and even your bank won’t pay any attention to this, so you’ll have to do the manual drudge work of changing your registered email address with key accounts.

On the plus side, you’ll find you get rid of an awful lot of junk mail and accounts that you didn’t want in the first place when you finally turn the forwarder off and close the old account. And you’ll feel like Liam Neeson, having freed your email account from the hostage takers.

You might think that there has never been a better time for collaboration. With a number of high-profile communication tools now available to businesses, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Dropbox, G-Suite and Skype, it's difficult to believe that email is still a key player.

But new research from Ingram Micro into how people work in small and mid-sized businesses has revealed that 80% of respondents see email as their primary collaboration and communication tool.

The main reason given is because it is easy to use, despite not being fully optimised for collaboration. Because most of us have used email for decades, it is an easy fall-back, particularly when communicating with clients or other external people.

Almost a third of respondents to the survey say that modern tools such as Skype and instant messaging need to be introduced in their workplaces. In these cases, it may well be that email is being used as the only viable option, with other tools provided by businesses either being too complicated, or simply not up to the job.

The survey also highlights generational differences in employees' use of such software. A whopping 85% of under 35's admit to using workplace technologies such as instant messaging, Skype, file hosting and sharing tools that aren't supported or authorised by their employers.

Use of unauthorised tools like this is called shadow IT, and it raises serious security questions. When IT teams aren't aware of hardware or software being used in the business environment, they aren't able to secure it, or enforce any policies around usage.

A rise in use of tools like this is likely to be a response to companies not providing adequate ways to communicate or share files. The survey respondents who used technologies not supplied by their organisations said they did so due to ease of use, value for money, and the ability to save time.

Mozilla has announced its opensource email client Thunderbird will benefit from a redesigned user interface (UI) and better Gmail support within the next year.

As part of its roadmap for 2019, the firm will grow its team by half a dozen members, from eight to 14 engineers, in order to make the service faster, more secure, and improve the user experience (UX).

Announcing the plans in a blog post, the Firefox developer said it will build on the progress made with the release of Thunderbird 60 in August, which saw major upgrades to its core code and improvements to security and stability.

"We heard from users who upgraded and loved the improvements, and we heard from users who encountered issues with legacy add-ons or other changes that they hurt their workflow," said Thunderbird community manager Ryan Spies.

"We listened, and will continue to listen. We're going to build upon what made Thunderbird 60 a success, and work to address the concerns of those users who experienced issues with the update.

"Hiring more staff will go a long way to having the manpower needed to build even better releases going forward."

Mozilla will prioritise Thunderbird's design and UX improvements, after receiving "considerable feedback" and complaints, with a primary focus on improving compatibility with Google's Gmail.

This, specifically, will see better support for Gmail's labels, a way to categorise messages, and improvements to how Gmail-specific features translate to the Thunderbird client.

Among the project's engineering priorities for the new year will be looking into methods for measuring slowness, and developing fixes to specific bugs that deteriorate the user experience.

The new staff members will also be put to work re-writing parts of the core code and "working toward a multi-process Thunderbird".

The client's notifications and encryption settings will also benefit from an overhaul, the firm confirmed.

Thunderbird will seek to integrate its own notifications with a user's operating system, while Mozilla will allow users to more easily secure their communications after an engineer was recently hired with a specific remit over security.

Mozilla hasn't yet completely determined its roadmap, and wouldn't guarantee that all changes outlined, including the UI redesign, would be available in the next Thunderbird release.

Slack has bought AI-powered email client Astro, hoping to integrate smarter features into its collaboration platform, the company has revealed.

Astro uses AI to surface the most important emails at the top of a user's inbox. It also supports integrations with calendars too, surfacing those crucial appointments before others that may flood your diary.

Astro has strong links with Slack it's already added some of its features to the platform via Slack's broad collection on integrations, and now slack reportedly wants to take this one step further by adding a native email management solution into its product. Astrobot, built by the company, allows you to check your email and calendar right from Slack.

But, for existing Astro users, it's bad news. As part of the deal, Astro's email application will be killed off on 10 October, a clear sign that Slack is building its own, similar email app that would make Astro's current product unnecessary

"We've taken some steps to make it possible to integrate email into Slack, but now we're in a position to make that interoperability much simpler and much, much more powerful," Slack said in a statement.

Despite one of Slack's USPs being to eradicate the need for emailing, the purchase of Astro is a very smart move for the collaboration platform, especially as the majority of both companies' customers being business users. And we know how much Slack is trying to dominate the B2B market.

"Whereas last year we just needed to make it so that more people could use the Slack that already exists, now we're starting to take steps to expand what Slack is," April Underwood, Slack's chief product officer said, in a statement to Quartz.

The price of the acquisition has yet to be revealed, but given that Slack is now worth in excess of $7 billion, it's unlikely to make a dent in its fortunes.

It was a bright, cold morning in 1995, and the clocks were striking eleven. Some Might Say was playing on the radio, and I'd just sat down at my computer desk with a cup of coffee. I opened my telnet client as usual, and connected to the university email service to see what my friends were up to that day. And there it was: my first piece of spam.

It's hard to fully describe the feelings that swirled inside me. This was the only internet account I had ever known, and it was more than just an inbox to me - it was the locus of my identity. Even in person, friends addressed me unironically by my user ID, "deg20". Now, my online home was being invaded. I fired off a furious response - and, of course, it bounced straight back. There was no way to undo the violation. No way to prevent it happening again. My inbox was no longer my own.

I won't ever forget that feeling - but equally, I couldn't end my love affair with email. I carried on checking my messages ten times a day until I graduated; then I got my first office job, and went up to 20.

It was an easy addiction, because everyone else loved email too. At first, the incoming messages were mostly personal - my newly employed friends and I spent days on end firing emails back and forth among ourselves, costing our employers thousands in wasted revenue.

Then the private sector got in on the act. Before long, it seemed like every time I bought a book online, connected to a social network or logged onto a Wi-Fi hotspot, I'd find myself added to another mailing list. Some of the messages were useful, detailing train times, confirming access codes and so on. Most weren't. Services such as unroll.me sprung up to deal with the deluge; Gmail started tagging messages as "Promotions" and "Updates" to help me cope, but even so I started to open my inbox with trepidation.

It didn't help that email was becoming ubiquitous within the various offices I worked at. In retrospect, it's obvious why: a quick email is far less intrusive than picking up the phone. At the same time, it sneakily buys you some free time - because they're not going to respond right away - and establishes a written record of what was said should you later need to cover your arse.

Before long, email overload had become a genuine problem - and it was clear that something had to give. Back in 2012, this very magazine published a major investigation by our man Stewart Mitchell entitled "The Death of Email", concluding that with more than 90 trillion messages being sent a year, and some employees spending as much as 20 hours a week just fielding emails, the whole thing was becoming untenable.

Looking back, I have to say that the feature was quite prescient - take a bow, Stewart. Email didn't die, obviously, but it's no longer the only game in town. Today my work conversations take place over Slack, while personal stuff goes on WhatsApp. I still check my email account, but it's no longer a priority; if there's something in there that I actually need to read and respond to, it's fifty-fifty whether I'll even spot it amongst the chaff.

May, of course, brought a particular deluge ahead of the arrival of the new data protection regulations. Seemingly every business I've ever so much as walked past on the street popped up in my inbox, begging for permission to bombard me with emails in a GDPR-compliant way. In many cases, these were companies I'd already instructed not to contact me, so the messages were themselves in breach of the old regulations. But since those were self-evidently toothless, I can't really blame the marketers for taking a final punt.

At any rate, I have given consent to precisely zero of these chancers - and it's a surprisingly empowering feeling. It remains to be seen how effective GDPR will be in the long run, but right now, for the first time in more than two decades, I'm starting to feel that my inbox is genuinely my own

The question now is whether all of this is too late to rehabilitate email. When almost all of my online interaction takes place on instant messaging services, does it even matter what lands in my inbox?

When I mentioned the subject of this column to PC Pro's Tim Danton - a conversation that, naturally, we had over Slack - he agreed that email feels "very old-fashioned". Indeed, there's something tragic about the way Google has been touting new features in Gmail, such as snoozing messages and sending self-deleting emails with expiration dates. They're not bad ideas, but now? Email? In 2018?

And yet I won't be closing my Gmail account any time soon. Because, once the chit-chat has migrated away, and the mailing-list spam has been shut off, what's left? I'll tell you what: all those informational messages, detailing what time my flight to Copenhagen departs, and confirming my hotel booking at the other end.

Email may no longer be the intensely personal thing it once was, but if you can cut through the rubbish it still makes a great online filing cabinet, accessible from anywhere, and instantly searchable. It's years since I last felt the need to file a paper document in my physical box file, and I can't imagine why I would ever need to again.

I'm sure this sort of evolution isn't what the lawmakers had in mind when drafting the GDPR, but part of the beauty of technology is in finding ways to make the best of it. For years I've been readying myself for the death of email, but I suspect it's about to take on a new lease of life.

Image: Shutterstock

The White House has undertaken an official internal investigation following revelations that top aides, including the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner, used personal email accounts to conduct official business.

White House officials, led by the White House counsel's office have begun looking at batches of emails stored on the White House server going to and from top advisors' private accounts, four officials familiar with the matter told Politico.

One of the sources, according to Politico, stated that the White House would be analysing the messages to determine if the undisclosed emails related to the investigations into the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia, as well as any confidential government secrets.

To add further embarrassment, Kushner's lawyer Abbe Lowell accidentally forwarded an email from the chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee to notorious email prankster Sinon_Reborn (recently revealed by Wired to be UK web designer James Linton), marking the second time that Lowell has been duped by Linton.

The email, sent from chairman Richard Burr and vice-chairman Mark R. Warner, sharply reminded Kushner that the Committee had requested him to retain and provide all relevant communications pertaining to the Russia investigation.

"The Committee was concerned to learn of this additional email account from the news media, rather than from you, in your closed staff interview," the email read. "Please confirm that the document production that you made to the Committee... included the additional 'personal email account' described to the news media."

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters yesterday: "The White House has been clear and instructs all staff to fully comply with presidential records acts. All staff has been briefed on the need to preserve those records, and we'll continue to do so."

26/09/2017: Committee wants more evidence of White House private emails

Five high level White House aides have been accused of using private email accounts to conduct official government business, in addition to President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Key advisors including Stephen Miller and Gary D. Cohn have routed official communications through personal accounts, along with ex-chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist and ex-Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon and even Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, according to anonymous officials speaking to The New York Times.

US officials are now demanding more information from White House counsel Donald McGahn, via a letter from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. McGahn has until 9 October to identify "any non-career official" who used a personal account for official White House business.

The news comes just days after Kushner's lawyer Abbe Lowell admitted that the President's son-in-law and close personal advisor used a privately-controlled email account to handle official communications.

This behaviour is not illegal, provided that the emails are forwarded to an official account for auditing and oversight purposes, which Lowell claims Kushner did. He also said that less than 100 emails were handled.

However, the revelations have drawn accusations of hypocrisy from many pundits. Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server was one of Trump's main points of attack during the presidential election campaign, with Trump stating that it was evidence of corruption on the part of his opponent. Clinton and her allies pointed to then-FBI director Jasmes Comey's decision to re-open the investigation into Clinton's emails on the eve of the election as one of the main reasons she lost.

One of Trump's most popular campaign slogans was "lock her up", and the president repeatedly pledged to do everything in his power to get his political rival thrown in jail for the same thing that his son-in-law and close political advisor has now admitted to, before walking back from those promises once elected.

IT Pro has contacted the president for comment. We will update when we receive a response.

Picture: Bigstock

Since parting company with Dell last year, SonicWall has been busy developing its Email Security product family with a view to moving up the food chain to the enterprise markets. Targeting companies ranging from 10 to 10,000 users, it has introduced a range of enhanced features and now includes its Capture ATP (advanced threat protection) cloud sandbox technology, which focuses on threats such as ransomware.

Capture ATP intercepts email attachments, subjects them to a barrage of cloud resident tests and blocks any it deems as malicious. This augments an extensive range of standard security measures including anti-spam, anti-phishing, anti-spoofing and anti-virus services, plus optional email compliancy/DLP (data leak prevention) and encryption.

We've reviewed the Email Security 9.0 software version which is designed to be hosted on a Windows Server platform of your choice. There are plenty of other options, as SonicWall also offers versions that can be supplied on one of three turnkey appliances, virtualized on a hardened VMware VM or run as a SonicWall hosted cloud service.

SonicWall offers a lot of licensing options and we've shown the price for a one-year TotalSecure subscription for 1,000 users, which activates email protection, compliance, McAfee anti-virus and 24/7 support. Three other anti-virus engines are available, while the Capture ATP license for the same number of users only costs 974 for one year.

Deployment

Host hardware demands are quite modest and we chose a budget-priced HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen9 1U rack server equipped with a 3.7GHz E3-1240 v6 Xeon and 16GB of DDR4 memory. Storage requirements start at 160GB, but you'll need to factor in the expected email volume and quarantine area when sizing your hard disks. Our host was running Windows Server 2012 R2 and there's no indication yet that SonicWall supports Server 2016.

For testing, we introduced our Email Security host to a live network comprising Windows Active Directory (AD) and Exchange servers. Software installation including the Apache Tomcat web server only took around 20 minutes and we then logged in and followed the web console's quick start wizard.

We chose the recommended All-In-One mode, pointed the host at our Exchange server and chose MTA (mail transfer agent) with Smart Host routing, which sends all messages straight to our downstream server and provides message queuing should it become unavailable. A quick connection check confirmed all was well, and we then used the LDAP integration to import all our AD users and groups into the appliance.

Security

The software is ready go out of the box as it activates a full set of default email security policies. Anti-spam uses predefined aggressiveness settings to class dubious messages as spam or likely spam and send them to the recipient's junk box.

You can easily tweak the settings to suit and choose to have different ones for each message classification. They can be globally rejected, deleted, forwarded to another email address or tagged, and custom settings can be applied to specific AD users and groups.

The Compliance module allows custom message filters to be applied to mail in both directions and comes with a set of dictionaries and ID definitions containing details such as common financial terms and credit card number formats. Any messages that trigger compliance filters can be sent to an internal approval box for authorisation and you can apply automatic encryption or decryption.

We weren't overly impressed with SonicWall's support responses during testing as our licenses expired leaving the appliance in reporting mode. We went through the proper channels to get them renewed but had to wait four days until the support team returned from an extended public holiday.

Performance and Capture ATP

We test email security products in a live environment, as it forces them to deal with emerging and zero-day threats rather than just a stale pile of harvested mail. We left our Email Security host running for three weeks on its default settings and found it be remarkably effective, delivering a 99.2% spam detection rate.

The default anti-spam aggressiveness settings produced surprisingly few false positives but should these be over-enthusiastic, you can change them to suit. Our users were each sent a daily junk summary email so they could remotely view their junk box and, if permitted, release messages and personalise their anti-spam aggressiveness settings.

The Capture ATP feature also performed well, picking up a range of attachment file types, sending them to the cloud sandbox and then releasing them when deemed safe. We tested this by emailing ZIP attachments with malware inside to selected users and ATP deleted them and blocked the emails.

As the administrator, we were sent an email alert each time ATP detected a malicious file which provided a direct link to a status report. It's only when you view the report's summary that you realise just how many cloud scanners the files are checked by.

Verdict

Even after factoring in the cost of the host hardware and Windows OS, SonicWall's Email Security software still looks comparatively good value. It's highly scalable and very easy to manage, spam detection rates are extremely good and the new Capture ATP feature adds valuable cloud-based protection against the latest mail-borne threats.

Verdict

You’ll need to factor in a host system but good value, easy deployment and a great spam detection score makes SonicWall’s Email Security software a sound choice for SMBs and enterprises alike

Requirements

Adobe's annual Email Use Survey has revealed that although email is still seen as the most important marketing channel for businesses, it's on the downturn, with fewer professionals checking their business and personal email as thoroughly over the last year compared to 2016.

Email has become less of a commodity - people don't check their email in bed as much, for example, and employees will wait until they get into the office before signing into their account.

Additionally, Adobe revealed spam filtering has improved, meaning marketing emails are more likely to make their way into the junk mail folder than in previous years.

However, the report highlighted the importance of optimising email marketing campaigns for mobile, as 23% of respondents explained this has improved their experience of email over the last few years.

"As brands continue to embrace email marketing as a pivotal component to build delightful, holistic experiences, many struggle with meeting customers' heightened demands," said Stephan Dietrich, vice president of Adobe Campaign.

However, email remains the most important way for brands to contact potential customers, the research explained. 65% of people prefer to be contacted via email, while only 16% want direct mail promoting a company's products and services.

Although 51% of respondents are happy to receive special offers and promotions from brands, 39% said they would like to see emails that are more about providing information rather than being too salesy.

Adobe has now launched Adobe Campaign as part of its Adobe Marketing Cloud, which has been designed to send relevant and personalised emails to customers, using Adobe Sensei to identify a customer's likes and habits.

"Our new email innovations further cement our leadership in helping enterprises provide well-designed emails that enhance customer relationships, brand awareness and ultimately sales," Dietrich said.

Google will no longer scan Gmail accounts to deliver personalised ads - but it's not worried about your privacy so much as corporate customer confusion.

Anyone using the free, consumer version of Gmail will have noticed text ads based on the contents of your email. Corporate customers paying for its G Suite email don't see such ads and their accounts aren't scanned.

However, senior VP of Google Cloud Diane Greene told Bloomberg that some businesses were confused by the distinction between the services and voiced privacy concerns. "What we're going to do is make it unambiguous," said V Greene.

To avoid ambiguity, Google will stop scanning consumer Gmail accounts. "G Suite's Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalisation, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalisation after this change," added Greene in a blog post.

Ads will continue to appear in the free version of Gmail, but will be based on users' settings rather than the content of their email. Users can change those settings at any time or disable ad personalisation altogether. G Suite will remain ad free.

Greene added that the G Suite usage among corporate customers has more than doubled in the past year with over three million companies paying for Google's G Suite services. Google's cloud computing group, headed by Greene, is angling to acquire more corporate customers in an attempt to catch up with Microsoft Office's package, which currently hosts 80 % of the Fortune 500.

An estimated 80% of social business efforts do not achieve the intended benefits, according to Gartner, due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology. So how do CIOs establish the right policies for social media use within their organisations and how can IT leaders help the rest of the business make the most of the technology?

Christian McMahon, managing director and interim CIO at transformation specialist three25, says the biggest challenge for c-suite executives is the consistent reinforcement of the corporate message across multiple social accounts, without restricting usage.

McMahon says most companies have a set of brand values and marketing-driven statements that they want to get across. He says the desire to ensure consistency in messaging helps explain why so many organisations choose to centrally manage or outsource their social media accounts to an external agency. However, the hands-off approach can have its downsides.

"Outsourcing account management can actually stifle the message and turn your social media platform into another version of a staid and monotonous corporate web site. That approach will not endear you to the target markets you are trying so desperately to reach," says McMahon, who has held CIO roles at analyst firm Ovum and liquidity specialist GoIndustry.

"In my opinion, its key that you endorse corporate guidelines, but that you also allow the rope to be let out a little amongst your employees in order to encourage spontaneity that can help energise your social message. This will separate you from the herd, reinforce your brand and even attract new customers and talent."

It is a sentiment that chimes with Neil Moore, head of ICT at Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service. He says the key to making the most of social media is to give employees the room to engage. "All of our stations have got their own Twitter accounts and so we encourage staff to be proactive," he says.

The thought of a proactive approach might raise an alarm amongst more reticent business leaders. Moore recognises some executives will occasionally find a tweet where an individual says something that has not been thought through. However, the fire service is creating big benefits through social media and these plus-points are being recognised across the organisation.

"Generally speaking, we are maturing as an organisation in terms of how we use social media and the benefits of community engagement through social media hugely outweigh the concerns associated to the occasional problematic update," he says. Such is the power of collaboration that Hampshire Fire Service even runs its own internal Twitter awards ceremony.

"We have a series of categories for individuals, teams and stations," says Moore. "Our dog handlers, for example, might tweet about what they're up to. We've found that tweets about animal rescue create a huge amount of interest, particularly in the local media."

Laying the ground for success

IT departments, then, can play an important role in establishing the foundation for social success. Graham Benson, CIO at Rentalcars.com, says his team needs to understand customer requirements and help implement the right kinds of technical solutions. As a customer-focused organisation, he says the IT team will supply solutions to whatever challenges the business suggests its customers face.

"Collaboration has an increasingly important part to play in customer service, particularly in regards to engagement," he says. "There's a lot of chat about how social media can be monetised but I think customers wants to use the platform as a service and feedback outlet."

Carnegie Mellon University research suggests 72 % of online buyers actively use social media to build relationships and gather information on a company and its products. However, the research also states engagement is driven by subjects that capture the attention of the target audience. Benson suggests CIOs must work with trusted specialists to meet customer needs.

"The social strategy should be set by the marketing team and the user experience specialists," he says. "Our job, as the IT team, is to provide the technology and services that underpin that strategy. Of course, we need to have things like appropriate security levels, but ultimately the mobile strategy for our business is all about what's good for the consumer."

Tonino Ciuffini is another IT leader who says a successful approach to online collaboration is all about putting the client first. Ciuffini, who is head of information assets at Warwickshire County Council, says senior officials at his organisation understand the power of social selling.

"We use social media across the business," he says. "It's absolutely the right thing to do when it comes to keeping in touch with customers." The council press office, for example, provides regular updates, as do other council accounts, such as those associated to library and museum services.

"It's great when your organisation can use a platform to engage with citizens, to make it fun and to encourage more people to join in," says Ciuffini. "If the brand is right and the subject is right, social media will work. It's not quite as easy to create engagement around committee reports, for example."

Internal communication in the technology team is also kept from social platforms, says Ciuffini: "In most instances, face-to-face conversations and emails still predominate. We've talked about communication styles many times but our IT staff don't want to receive updates through Twitter or Google+."

Some technology chiefs, however, are exploring how social media can be used to boost customer satisfaction internally. Matt Britland, director of ICT at Lady Eleanor Holles School, has pioneered the use of Facebook in an educational setting. He uses closed private rooms with certain year groups to help facilitate discussion and information sharing.

"It's a free tool and all our students are already on the platform," says Britland. "It's about making the most of the tools that students are already using and showing them how it can be used in a way that they might not have considered."

He says the private group function in Facebook allows staff and students to create an on-going discussion forum. The opportunity to embed video and other content provides another boon in terms of collaboration.

"The students are great," says Britland. "Lots of pupils have their own groups for particular interests, both educationally and socially. We're finding that students are very proactive they're taking the tools and making their own choices."

If your business provides corporate email accounts for its staff, you might be tempted to keep tabs on exactly what it is they're using them for. There are numerous problems email surveillance can help with, including thwarting potential phishing attacks, monitoring employee behaviour and catching any data leaks (both accidental and otherwise) before it's too late.

However, if you're going to go poking around in people's private communications, you'll need to do it carefully. Not only is it considerd rather impolite, but failing to abide by regualtions governing employees' data privacy could land you in some serious hot water with industry watchdogs. Fear not, though; we've answered some of the burning questions to ensure you're surveilling responsibly.

We already use CCTV to enhance our physical security. Shouldn't we also be monitoring employee email to protect data security?

Perhaps, but it's important to be clear about exactly what benefit you hope to bring to the business. You need to be certain that it's worth the likely negative impact on staff morale. Right off the bat you should consider an impact assessment, and give serious thought to alternatives to email snooping.

Why don't I just not tell employees that their email is being monitored? Then there won't be a problem.

There certainly will be a problem if you get caught secretly monitoring communications. There are very few circumstances in which the law would allow you to do this without first telling employees what you're monitoring and why.

Exactly how upfront do I have to be?

You don't need to sit down and talk to each employee individually, but you must make every reasonable effort to alert them to what you're doing. Set out what's being monitored, how long it will be retained, how it will be used and who will have access to it. You must be able to give business-related reasons for monitoring, such as detecting criminal activity or unauthorised personal use of business resources.

The same applies if you want to monitor the web or other online resources - assuming that the equipment and the network connection are provided for work purposes. If employees are using their own hardware, other concerns may apply.

Surely if we disclose everything about our monitoring then that will tip off any employees who might be up to no good?

If the aim of the monitoring is to prevent breaches of trust then surely that's a good thing? However, you're allowed to monitor a specific employee covertly in order to investigate a suspicion of specific criminal activity. You can't go on a fishing expedition, but monitoring without notification is allowable under that rather narrow and limited exclusion.

Alright, I've warned everyone about surveillance. That's that then? Job's a good 'un?

Not quite. You ought to have an acceptable-use policy in place that forms part of everyone's contract of employment and covers what's acceptable online behaviour and what isn't. This policy can also set out the measures that may be taken, including email and web monitoring, so everyone knows where they stand.

What about the employees' right to privacy?

It's about time you asked about that! Everyone has the right to an expectation of privacy, although this is diluted when using work-provided resources. If your surveillance measures include the collection, storage and use of personal information (and it's hard to see how email monitoring would avoid this) then it isn't allowed to be excessive or routine, nor should it be unnecessarily intrusive.

If you cross any of these lines then you could well be in breach of data protection laws, and face a hefty fine from the Information Commissioner. That's why it's vital to do your homework: you should be able to show that you're using surveillance only where there's a clear need to do so; where less-intrusive measures couldn't be implemented instead.

It all sounds like a legal minefield.

You'll find more guidance in the ICO's Quick Guide to the Employment Practices Code. It's full of useful advice such as "Be particularly careful when monitoring communications, such as emails, that are clearly personal. Avoid wherever possible opening emails, especially those that clearly show they're private or personal. Monitor the message's address or heading only."

Can we be less intrusive by using automated monitoring software?

Automated software is fine for blocking or flagging inappropriate websites, but if you start building a database of everyone's emails then you're in danger of falling foul of the rules on excessive collection of personal data. Often the best solution is to set boundaries that are acceptable to everyone, such as letting employees use the web and access personal email accounts - as long as it doesn't interfere with their work.

The BYOD challenge

When employees access the internet via work-provided computers, your right to monitor them is quite clear-cut. Things become muddier when they bring their own devices to work - but if they're connecting to your corporate network then you can argue that you're monitoring the use of a company resource.

Other considerations also come into play, however. It's important to beef up your network security so you can decide which devices can connect, and how much access they get. You may even insist on installing some sort of Mobile Device Management (MDM) software on the device itself before it's allowed to connect.

This will help prevent outside devices from breaking your acceptable-use policy. You should, of course, also update this to include a section on BYOD that sets out what is and isn't allowed.

A number of TalkTalk services suffered an outage yesterday, with the telco blaming flash flooding for the problems.

Pages on the company's website displayed a holding message saying: "We'd like to apologise for any inconvenience during this time and suggest you try again later. Also due to severe weather conditions some of our systems are currently unavailable which means we may not be able to assist you when calling and suggest you don't call us right now unless it's urgent."

The services and webpages affected wereTalktalk.co.uk, Talktalk webmail, Help2.talkTalk.co.uk and talktalk.co.uk/contactus, making it tricky for users to report problems or get an update from the company.

Downdetector yesterday listed 521 reports of services not working.

Because the company did not tell customers it was planning to perform maintenance on its website, many users had speculated it could be another hack, after the company was breached last year.

Phat Monkey wrote on Twitter: "Anyone else not receiving#talktalkemail? Their site is down with a so called upgrade, hacked again? Why not warn customers 24hr before?"

However, TalkTalk has ruled out that possibility, blaming the outage on flash flooding in the Midlands, adding that its services are back online.

A spokeswoman toldIT Pro: "After the flash floods in the Midlands that led to some service disruption yesterday afternoon, we were able to bring the affected systems back online overnight. This means that all areas on our website are now accessible and email service should also be back up and running, although it might take a few hours for the backlog to clear."

Microsoft has apparently now fixed an issue with its Hotmail and Outlook spam filters that meant its users were being flooded with spam emails.

The company admitted on its support page that it had uncovered a problem, saying, "Some users may be receiving excessive spam mail," although it would not reveal exactly what went wrong.

Shortly after releasing the update on its service page, Microsoft rolled out updates to Hotmail and Outlook that fixed the filters and its own infrastructure to prevent it happening again.

"One will provide short term relief preventing spam reaching your inbox," reveals Microsoft. "The second will be a longer term fix which should stop spam reaching our infrastructure," the company explained.

The problems went on for around 17 hours according to users, which certainly left a bad taste in thier mouths. As expected, annoyed users posted messages of frustration on social media, ensuring Microsoft and their friends and followers knew of the problems.

Erica Jean wrote on Twitter: "HEY @Outlook @hotmail WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THE SPAM EMAILS TODAY? I've had almost 60 overnight and they're NOT GOING AWAY," while other users seemed to be in competition to announce how many spam emails they had received.

However, some users saw the lighter side of being spammed by spam.

"Look at all of these great deals I've been missing out on for years," Peck Ed wrote on Reddit. "Now if you chaps will excuse me, I'm off to become a... millionaire getting a great deal on my car insurance with my new Russian bride at the Casino with my free bets."

Jonathan Lakeman joked on Twitter: "Thanks to @hotmail the only genuine e-mail I got all day was from my desolate Nigerian Uncle (I didn't know I had). #slamdunkthejunk #spam."

If you click on the setting wheel icon within Outlook.com, you should see a drop down menu with a Leave Feedback option.

Click on this, and you'll be asked to select a box that best describes the nature of your feedback ("I love the new look" or "I don't like the new look"). Once that's done, you'll be asked to complete a form where you can go into more detail about what you do or don't like about the service, and whether or not you would recommend it to others.

Unfortunately, you can't. While users who trialled Outlook.com before its full launch were able to switch back and forth, since the Hotmail brand was retired if you switched over there's no way to switch back and you can't sign up for a new hotmail account.

The option to forward on an email no longer has its own standalone tab, like it did in Hotmail, which has created confusion for lots of users since the Outlook.com switchover took place.

If you need to access this feature, open an email and click on the reply tab. This will result in a drop down menu appearing that features a "Forward" option.

If you click on the downward arrow in the top left hand corner of the Outlook.com home screen, a menu with four tabs should drop down.

Click on the one marked "People" and all of your old Hotmail contacts should be there. If that's not the case, it might be worth flagging this issue to Microsoft to see if they can shed any light on it.

The People tab also lets you populate your contacts list with details of your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn connections, and message their social networking profiles without leaving Outlook.

Whereas Hotmail provided users with a chronological view of ever email they had received, Outlook.com groups together correspondents that have been sent by the same contact into an ongoing thread, making it difficult for users to pick out individual messages.

It's a similar system to the one employed by Gmail and the online version of Microsoft's corporate Outlook product, but if you're used to seeing your emails lined up in a linear fashion it may take a little while to get used to.

Microsoft appears to have re-jigged the print email function in Outlook since we originally posted our tutorial, much to the chargrin of users.

Previously, when you opened an Outlook email, you would click on the "Actions" button in the top right hand corner, which would result in a drop down menu appearing with a "Print Message" option.

Since then the "Actions" tab appears to have been discontinued and replaced with a "...", as pictured.

If you click on this, a new drop down menu should appear, and the "Print" option is listed at the bottom.

However, as you can see from the comments box below, some users seem to be without an "Actions" or "..." tab at this time, so all we can suggest is using your browser's print page function (CTRL + P) until Microsoft comes up with a suitable alternative.

Although this is hardly an ideal solution because, as well as the email, the Outlook side bars (detailing how many items are currently sitting in your inbox) and the ads along the right hand side, will also be printed out too.

If you click on the setting wheel icon within Outlook.com, you should see a drop down menu with a Leave Feedback option.

Click on this, and you'll be asked to select a box that best describes the nature of your feedback ("I love the new look" or "I don't like the new look"). Once that's done, you'll be asked to complete a form where you can go into more detail about what you do or don't like about the service, and whether or not you would recommend it to others.

Microsoft has made it relatively easy to deactivate Outlook.com accounts. To do this, users simply need to click on the account settings tab, scroll down and there should be an option to close your account there.

When you click on this, you'll be asked to enter your Outlook.com password and then taken to another screen that asks you to deactivate your account.

For some reason, when IT Pro clicked on the deactive Hotmail account link, we were taken back to the MSN home page. However, if this happens to you, try clicking here instead, as this allowed us to proceed with the termination process.

If you have a change of heart once you've deactivated your account, as long as you log into it again within 365 days, you can reclaim your email address and username.

Unfortunately, your contacts and emails are likely to have been wiped. So, if you do decide to pursue this route, make sure you've backed up everything first.

Microsoft has made it relatively easy to deactivate Outlook.com accounts. To do this, users simply need to click on the account settings tab, scroll down and there should be an option to close your account there.

When you click on this, you'll be asked to enter your Outlook.com password and then taken to another screen that asks you to deactivate your account.

For some reason, when IT Pro clicked on the deactive Hotmail account link, we were taken back to the MSN home page. However, if this happens to you, try clicking here instead, as this allowed us to proceed with the termination process.

If you have a change of heart once you've deactivated your account, as long as you log into it again within 365 days, you can reclaim your email address and username.

Unfortunately, your contacts and emails are likely to have been wiped. So, if you do decide to pursue this route, make sure you've backed up everything first.

Unfortunately, you can't. While users who trialled Outlook.com before its full launch were able to switch back and forth, since the Hotmail brand was retired if you switched over there's no way to switch back and you can't sign up for a new hotmail account.

The option to forward on an email no longer has its own standalone tab, like it did in Hotmail, which has created confusion for lots of users since the Outlook.com switchover took place.

If you need to access this feature, open an email and click on the reply tab. This will result in a drop down menu appearing that features a "Forward" option.

If you click on the downward arrow in the top left hand corner of the Outlook.com home screen, a menu with four tabs should drop down.

Click on the one marked "People" and all of your old Hotmail contacts should be there. If that's not the case, it might be worth flagging this issue to Microsoft to see if they can shed any light on it.

The People tab also lets you populate your contacts list with details of your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn connections, and message their social networking profiles without leaving Outlook.

Whereas Hotmail provided users with a chronological view of ever email they had received, Outlook.com groups together correspondents that have been sent by the same contact into an ongoing thread, making it difficult for users to pick out individual messages.

It's a similar system to the one employed by Gmail and the online version of Microsoft's corporate Outlook product, but if you're used to seeing your emails lined up in a linear fashion it may take a little while to get used to.

Microsoft appears to have re-jigged the print email function in Outlook since we originally posted our tutorial, much to the chargrin of users.

Previously, when you opened an Outlook email, you would click on the "Actions" button in the top right hand corner, which would result in a drop down menu appearing with a "Print Message" option.

Since then the "Actions" tab appears to have been discontinued and replaced with a "...", as pictured.

If you click on this, a new drop down menu should appear, and the "Print" option is listed at the bottom.

However, as you can see from the comments box below, some users seem to be without an "Actions" or "..." tab at this time, so all we can suggest is using your browser's print page function (CTRL + P) until Microsoft comes up with a suitable alternative.

Although this is hardly an ideal solution because, as well as the email, the Outlook side bars (detailing how many items are currently sitting in your inbox) and the ads along the right hand side, will also be printed out too.

If you click on the setting wheel icon within Outlook.com, you should see a drop down menu with a Leave Feedback option.

Click on this, and you'll be asked to select a box that best describes the nature of your feedback ("I love the new look" or "I don't like the new look"). Once that's done, you'll be asked to complete a form where you can go into more detail about what you do or don't like about the service, and whether or not you would recommend it to others.

Microsoft has made it relatively easy to deactivate Outlook.com accounts. To do this, users simply need to click on the account settings tab, scroll down and there should be an option to close your account there.

When you click on this, you'll be asked to enter your Outlook.com password and then taken to another screen that asks you to deactivate your account.

For some reason, when IT Pro clicked on the deactive Hotmail account link, we were taken back to the MSN home page. However, if this happens to you, try clicking here instead, as this allowed us to proceed with the termination process.

If you have a change of heart once you've deactivated your account, as long as you log into it again within 365 days, you can reclaim your email address and username.

Unfortunately, your contacts and emails are likely to have been wiped. So, if you do decide to pursue this route, make sure you've backed up everything first.

Google has been forced to backtrack on an April Fools' Day prank that went drastically wrong.

To mark the day, the tech giant added a feature to Gmail allowing users to send messages with a gif of a Minion dropping a mic, with any replies to that message never reaching the user's inbox.

The 'Send + Mic Drop' button replaced the usual 'Send and Archive' option, which caused many users to unwittingly click the button and send messages featuring the 'MicDrop' gif.

In a blog post announcing the feature, Google said: "Today, Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new 'Send + Mic Drop' button. Everyone will get your message, but that's the last you'll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won't see it."

Many Gmail users subsequently took to Google's support forums to express their anger over the feature, with one user complaining they had lost their job due to accidentally sending the gif to their boss, while others complained that they had accidentally sent it to important business contacts.

It does appear, however, that Google had thought about the issue posed to businesses prior to the release of the prank, as the button was not enabled on the accounts of enterprise business users.

"Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We're truly sorry," Google said in a statement earlier today that was added to the original blog post. "The feature has been turned off. If you are still seeing it, please reload your Gmail page."

Google did not immediately outline the cause of the bug, but added: "It looks like we pranked ourselves this year."

Yahoo is intensifying its mission to "kill the password" with the release of a new account login process for Yahoo apps.

The web services provider stated its intentions to ditch the password a year ago, when it announced its plans to introduce "on-demand passwords" that would be texted to a user's mobile devices.

Now those plans have been polished and rolled into a new login method, Yahoo Account Key.

The service works by sending Yahoo users a push notification on their mobile phone for them to approve whenever they attempt to sign into their Yahoo account from a new desktop browser.

Once the user receives the notification and taps the approval button, they will immediately be signed in.

"Passwords can be a hassle they're easy to lose track of and forget, or they are weak passwords that are vulnerable to hacking. At Yahoo, we are moving fast in our mission to kill the password' and make it easier for users to sign in without sacrificing security," said Yahoo product manager Lovlesh Chhabra in a blog post.

This new login method will appear for Yahoo Finance, Fantasy, Mail, Messenger, and Sports for iOS and Android.

Yahoo claimed this method of account verification is more secure than passwords. However, the company also said users must not sign out of their Yahoo app or turn off notifications "as this will prevent you from receiving your Account Key push notification".

Yahoo is not alone in its decision to explore new methods of user verification. Other web service providers have also been taking steps to move away from account passwords.

Bad passwords are one of the biggest reasons people's accounts are hacked, with the most commonly used password in 2015 being '123456'.

Music identification app Shazam does not use passwords at all, instead sending a verification email to the users when they attempt to sign to the app for the first time on a new device.

Google offers its Google Authentication app, which is used as an additional layer of verification, via randomised passcodes on the user's mobile device, for selected web services.

And the latest Apple devices, such as the iPhone SE and iPad Pro, include fingerprint sensors which enable user to confirm their identify simply by holding their finger to the devices home button.

Yahoo has stopped some of its customers accessing their email inbox if they are running ad blockers, in an attempt to dissuade people from using the software.

Customers in the US have reported seeing a message from the internet company asking them to disable their ad blocker before being able to view their inbox.

Although some users said they had been able to circumvent the message, others haven't been so lucky and were disappointed Yahoo was taking such steps. In fact, one customer, Andrei Herasimchuk - Yahoo's former Senior Director of Product Design, said he was planning to move to Apple Mail as a result of Yahoo's actions.

"So @YahooMail has blocked my inbox for using an ad blocker. It was a good run, I guess. Goodbye! Hello Apple Mail, as much as I hate it," he wrote on Twitter.

Yahoo said it had made the move as part of its US product testing scheme, but it didn't say whether it would continue to test the pop-up or disable it as a result of customer complaints.

The company explained only some users were seeing the message because it was A/B testing the ad blocker detecting technology.

"At Yahoo, we are continually developing and testing new product experiences. This is a test we're running for a small number of Yahoo Mail users in the US," a spokesperson told Engadget.

Yahoo is the latest company to restrict access to its website for those running ad blockers. In the past, high-profile companies including The Washington Post and City AM have trialled similar methods to encourage users to disable ad blocking tech.

Tom Yeomans, CEO of Yavli, a company that makes technology to subvert ad blockers, told Digiday: "They're likely testing this particular approach, banning ad blocker users, on their email service because they know their users will be forced to disable their ad blocker if they want to check their emails within their web browser.

"Their users' email account content are unique to them, so it's different from news content where they can visit a competing website to get a same or similar experience."

Email has become the habit the enterprise can't break, the communication channel that contributes to wasted time and energy as much as it allows us to get stuff done.

It needs to change if it is to stick around, and IBM believes it has found the solution. IBM Verse purports to be a completely new way of thinking about email, combining it with all other areas of office life to help the now-ancient messaging tool regain some relevance, lost trust and become productive again.

Discussed at length at this week's IBM ConnectED event in Orlando, Florida, IBM claimed Verse will "revolutionise" how business and IT leaders think about and work with email, and could be the answer to the productivity woes that have made sifting through our inboxes a necessary chore rather than a path to efficient communication.

Speaking at the event, Kramer Reeves, director of product management messaging and collaboration solutions at IBM, said: "Before last year, nobody was really looking at re-imagining this space. It was sort of a given that we were being handcuffed by email with 20-plus years of more features and functions, but not a completely reimagined experience.

"So when we showed up last year and came up with the concept of, 'let's look at turning email on its head,' it was the beginning of a new phase in the market of rediscovering the importance of email and how we actually reimagine it."

Verse brings previously disparate tools such as calendar, instant messaging, file sharing, storage and email together into one place, also integrating IBM's Watson as a virtual assistant.

"We came out first with this concept of prioritisation and focus attention management, and the analytics being able to really provide this kind of prioritisation for us to change the way we work," Reeves continued. "The software, analytics especially, has really caught up with this promise of the system getting smarter, the system working for me.

"Over the last year we've spent time moving to the point where we're there we have a system that truly is intelligent, and really is working for me, completely redesigned through a new experience that is focused on first the individual, and very shortly the groups, and also concepts."

One of the most significant features of Verse has analytics determine which of the users' contacts are most important or relevant, placing them in the top bar for easier access. When clicking on the person's icon, users will then be able to view important information, appointments and email threads related to them.

"If you think about how often customers or users will check their email up to 30 times an hour and there's certainly an always-on, always-available mentality," Reeves told IT Pro, "but when you take into account the seconds that turn into minutes of unproductive time throughout the day, how can we bring more attention to the most important emails or people that you need to interact with?

"The big premise with Verse was to use analytics to present to the user the people they should interact with the most based on certain algorithms we've built into the product, and also the presentation of these people that the system will learn after repeated usage"

The file sharing and storage capabilities also put Verse up against rival services such as Dropbox and Box, which ties into how many users now think of their inbox as a corpus of knowledge, contact information, passwords and actions as well as a basic file management system.

This has security implications, of course, and vice president of development and IBM Collaboration Solutions, Ronnie Maffa, believes that Verse would tackle those issues in a way that's more comfortable for both the individual user and companies keen to regain some control over what their staff are doing with sensitive files and information.

"The enterprise has begun to recognise that employees have found other methods to share files, in a way they're not comfortable with from a security standpoint, so I believe in 2015 many companies will try to co-opt that back so they can protect their content," she told IT Pro.

"Companies now understand the pervasive connectiveness of people, how important that is. That wave is pretty much there there are very few people in the enterprise who don't understand the need of connecting their people and allowing that open sharing. However, I believe that 2015 will be the year that they want to put social to work."

IBM isn't the only company attempting to overhaul the way social is used at work, however, with Facebook recently announcing itsFacebook for Work service late last year. As well as the established functions of the site adapted to suit a professional user base, the service will also incorporate document collaboration.

But IBM's tactic of putting additional social features, themselves familiar to an increasingly social world, into email is intended to aid adoption in that it is based in something classically comfortable to use in the workplace.

"The heart of the original strategy was bringing social closer to where our customers were spending their time," Reeves said. "The adoption of social technology, especially from the consumer standpoint, was expanding tremendously, and in the enterprise that adoption was starting to occur but not quite at the pace we wanted. So we're bringing more of the social to a place of comfort where our users exist into the inbox."

When asked whether this new wave of social business tools could blur the line between work and life even further than is already the case, Maffa said: "The intent of IBM Verse is not necessarily tapping into an [always-on] culture, but very much supporting the need of the individual.

"I would say that there is a number of considerations we need to have there are a lot of individuals who are by nature blending work with life, or with their family, however data separation was something we were very conscious of."

Whether the enterprise accepts it or not, then, social is coming to the workplace with a new sense of purpose. Tools like IBM Verse and Facebook for Work are attempting to smooth the transition from exclusively using email in many cases, to a multi-channel, multifaceted social hub designed to improve productivity and collaboration.

Reeves added: "Social has really exploded on the consumer level, and there's an expectation with users today that they want to share, they want to collaborate, they want to work together, and they want an environment that can bring those capabilities elegantly and seamlessly and in a way that's easy to use."

Accenture and BT are set to battle it out to win the NHS' email contract, after the health service named them as the final two suppliers under consideration.

The two-year NHSmail contract will provide a secure email service for NHS staff, and is valued at 350 million.

The two selected firms were picked from five bidders, including CSC, Vodafone and GDIT, to compete for the deal, which is expected to be announced in February 2015.

A spokesperson for the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) said: "Evaluation of bids to run the new NHSmail service is complete.

"All shortlisted suppliers from the Crown Commercial Service's Managed Email Framework provided strong bids, with two suppliers leading.

"In order to ensure the correct service is provided, BT and Accenture have been invited to participate in an extended clarification period. The other suppliers have been notified that they were unsuccessful."

The contract is due to be awarded in March next year, succeeding the organisation's current email contract with Cable and Wireless, under which staff used Microsoft Exchange 2007.

The existing contract has run since 2002, and users will be migrated onto the new NHSmail service by December 2015.

Yahoo Mail users have been hit by service problems for over a week as engineers battle to repair an undersea cable.

The cable was accidentally cut during routine maintenance work leaving UK and US users unable to access their accounts and others facing slow page loading times. The worst affected regions appear to be eastern US and western Europe.

Sky and BT customers were also affected, as both use Yahoo to provide email services to their users.

"We are aware that Yahoo Mail is slow or inaccessible for some of our users. The issues were a result of an underwater fibre cable cut, caused by a third party while fixing a separate cable," the firm said on its status page.

"The engineering team has rerouted email traffic to mitigate accessibility issues. A cable repair ship has been mobilised and will be at the site this weekend."

The notice added: "Some Yahoo Mail users are experiencing delays in accessing and viewing their mail. We'll be posting updates regularly on this page to keep everyone informed of our progress. Thank you for your patience as we work to fully resolve this."

The firm apologised for the inconvenience and said it understood that email was "a critical service" for its customers.

Disgruntled users have taken to social networking site Twitter to vent their frustrations about the service problems.

"If yahoo was #rbs they'd be fined 56m for locking us out of our accounts. How am I expected to run my business with #yahoomaildown?" tweeted one angry user.

The firm has not yet said when service would completely resume, but users are advised to follow Yahoo's Customer Care Twitter account @YahooCare for updates.

Update: According to Yahoo Mail's status page, engineers have located the underwater cable affecting its network. "Testing and repairs are currently taking place. The Yahoo engineering team continues to monitor email traffic. Thank you for your patience," it said.

Users once more took to Twitter to air their disgust.

"Yahoo mail is down again. Can't send emails. Do you ever notice that you never hear that Google Mail is down? #yahoomail #yahoomaildown," said Twitter user Mark LoPresti.

IBM has announced a new cloud-based platform that it believes could replace enterprise email.

Dubbed IBM Verse, the product brings together email, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social updates, video chats and meetings into a single environment.

Through its at-a-glance user interface (UI), IBM said, content can be shared as a blog post or through cloud-based communities rather than an email, if desired, with a single click.

"Rather than replying to a narrow email distribution, project leaders can share their insights as a blog post for their entire project team, with the ability to delegate and track critical actions across individual team members," said IBM.

Beyond simply unifying these seven elements of workplace-productivity software into one, Verse also includes "intelligent task prioritisation". This uses data analytics to determine and highlight the user's most important tasks for the day, and predictive analytics to anticipate their preferences and behaviours and tailor the software to them.

"By learning unique employee preferences and priorities over time, it provides instant context about a given project as well as the people and teams collaborating on it," IBM said.

The company added it won't use the data mined for these services to serve advertising or "monetise that data in other ways", which it describes as "an unwelcome proposition for business users concerned about privacy or which operate in regulated industries".

Verse customers will eventually be able to integrate a feature from Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-winning AI, that will enable users to ask a question on a certain topic and receive a direct reply, with answers ranked by degree of confidence.

IBM will also offer a Verse app for iOS and Android, so users can access it while on the move.

Verse, which is built on IBM's SoftLayer cloud platform, will be available on a freemium basis through the IBM Cloud marketplace from the beginning of 2015, although some "select clients and partners" will have access to a beta version before the end of the month.