Simple, Secure, Private Email – @hiwaay.net
Thousands of @hiwaay.net customers trust HiWAAY for private email services every day.
@hiwaay.net is a simple and secure email service which allows you to quickly send and receive messages. @hiwaay.net email offers a web-based interface for accessing your email from any web browser, and 750MB of storage for basic accounts. Most POP and IMAP desktop email clients and mobile-device email apps are supported as well.
Reserve your @hiwaay.net email address today.
Only $5.95/month or $54.95/year.
Why shouldn’t I just go get a free email account at Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail?
Free accounts are perfect when you don’t really care what happens to them. They’re great when you need to supply an email address to a company that you think may spam you later. Or if you need or want to remain anonymous to the intended recipients or otherwise separate that email from your important stuff. Or for leaving as a contact address on a website that will probably get harvested for spam or advertising someday.
The Cost of Free Email – We hear it every day, “What cost? Free email services are free, aren’t they?” By now you should know there’s no such thing as “free” – everything has a cost. It may not come out of your wallet each month, but there’s definitely a cost.
Here are some of the costs that you can associate with free email services:
- Privacy Concerns – The free email providers have to subsidize their operation somehow. The vast majority of free email service providers make money by indexing the content of your emails and selling your personal data, shopping preferences, search history, and many other data points to targeted advertisers. Rest assured, your information is in a database somewhere…
- Spam – Free email services seem to receive a disproportionate amount of spam. There are various theories about why, but the fact is that you’ll get more spam with a free mail service than with a regular ISP or private email service provider. Some are better at filtering it than others, but the amount of spam that each service deals with is enormous – and often legitimate email is a casualty of that battle.
- Customer Service – For all intents and purposes, there is no customer service for free email accounts. This is truly a case of “you get what you pay for”. While there might be web forms and email address that will accept your question, your chances of getting a response are often proportional to what you paid – zero.
- Limits and Restrictions – Most free services have limits of how much email you can send in any given time period. Often there are other limits placed on functionality should you choose to use, or are restricted to using the service’s web-based interface.
At a minimum, you should never use a free email service to keep the only copy of anything that you consider important. You run a serious risk of losing it – without warning and without recourse. We see it every day: documents, term papers and dissertations lost, job offers and opportunities vanished, or valuable contact information gone forever.
Here’s how to judge: if the email account went away completely tomorrow, along with all of the mail and contact information that it contains, would it be an inconvenience to you, or a complete catastrophe? If the latter, then you need to reconsider your use of your free account.