The software downloaded your emails then deleted them from the mail server. In the old days, email programs used POP3, the Post Office Protocol. If you use an email client then you won’t see any targeted adverts even if your emails are scanned.
The pre-web alternative was to use an email client program to download new emails to your PC. Most people now access their email service via a web browser.
Reader favourite Windows Live Mail is being phased out in favour of alternatives such as Windows 10’s built-in Mail and Calendar app.
There’s a 30-day free trial so you can test it first, and a migration guide to help you switch from another supplier. The Basic service with 2GB of storage costs $30 per year, while 25GB costs $50 and 100GB costs $90 per year. You’d be more likely to use this as a supplementary service than for all your emails.įastMail is a popular alternative, because it offers good support with no ads and no tracking, but it’s not free.
ProtonMail Plus costs €48 per year for 5GB of storage, while ProtonMail Visionary costs €288 per year for 20GB. However, it only provides 500MB of storage to non-paying users. ProtonMail, which is based in Switzerland, is one of the most privacy-conscious email services, and offers encrypted and self-destructing emails. You may find it’s worth paying €24 per year for 30GB of storage and other features such as domain aliases and Microsoft Active Sync support. It offers a free service with 5GB of mail storage space, so you can try it. It’s primarily aimed at business users, and includes an online office suite and other features. If you want to avoid those, Zoho Mail is a good alternative. Neither of the two largest email services – Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s – scans your emails for advertising purposes. Even if you try to stay anonymous and block cookies, you might be identified by techniques such as device profiling, fingerprinting, and AI systems that can recognise your typing.
The larger problem is that the whole web economy is based on surveillance, and there’s very little you can actually do about it. In other words, scanning emails to tailor advertising is a relatively minor issue in the great scheme of things. In the future, it may include information from home speakers (Google Home etc), household gadgets (Nest etc), fitness bands, smartwatches, cars (Waymo) and other connected devices.Īs AI gets smarter, there will be more and more opportunities for companies to track you, profile you, and help you. These features involve AI software reading your emails, tracking your website visits, and your location. For example, Google might tell you about traffic jams or flight delays, put appointments in your calendar, or offer to write quick email replies for you. The problem is that Google has lots of other reasons to read your email, and you may find some of them useful.
The good news is that you can delete a lot of it, with the help of a Guardian article by Dylan Curran: Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you. Add Google Search and it already knows so much about you that scanning your emails may well be superfluous. Google has the world’s largest known tracking system, thanks partly to Google Analytics – which is used on far more websites than any Facebook tracker – and its DoubleClick advertising business. As Alex Hern explained here, “the adverts will now be targeted in the same way as other Google services, based on information gleaned from other activity on users’ profiles, such as their searches, browsing activity, and even physical locations”. That didn’t mean you would get adverts picked at random. That changed last summer, when Google announced that it would no longer scan emails to tailor adverts.
You could only avoid it by using a paid-for version of the service. When Google launched Gmail in 2004, it did indeed scan your emails for advertising purposes. Google’s email service, Gmail, no longer scans the contents of your communications for targeting ads.