Such internet companies as MSN, Yahoo, and AOL aren’t interested in progress
It is difficult to imagine, that in our time of high technologies there exist places, where progress didn’t come. Moreover, the more this progress can reduce possible profit, the longer time they are restraining it by all available means.
As you know, the most of free e-mail services exist because of advertising earnings that is shown to the Users in the web-interface of mailbox. That is the reason why does internet giants of web-industry do not hurry to made the free access for e-mail by means of protocols POP3 and SMTP, because then the effects of their publicity will decrease, and they do not want that.Such giants as Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and AOL.com have many users who are attached to other services of the companies and they are being slow to provide users with such access, just because people got used to use the web interface.
Surely there exist some methods to evade these restraints. For example, there are programs of third-party writers for Yahoo.com who convert the web-traffic into POP3. But this increases the possibility of password stealing with the help of that program, and that reduces the willing to use it. For Hotmail.com by MSN there is a possibility to use a special protocol, which is integrated into Outlook Express, and is not available to other email program developers, which also limits the user’s freedom to choose an email program. AOL.com provides access via POP3 and SMTP, but only to the clients that are connected to this ISP, this is also bounds the e-mail usage area as AOL.com provides its ISP services only in certain areas.
However, they lose a lot, trying to follow the outdated marketing policy that is intended for online advertising, and limiting the user’s freedom in his choice. There is another way to monetize guests by attracting and keeping users. Such new model of user treatment was Google.com Company and its e-mail service - Gmail.com. Users have the access to POP3 and SMTP interfaces, which does not limit the user’s opportunities to work with the email. However this service has a great advantage over common mailing applications like Outlook Express - it is a big volume of mailbox disk space allowing user to keep all the e-mails straight at the server and get access to its’ mailbox from any part of the world.Plus, only relevant advertising is shown to a user, no bothering banners! Such service format increasingly wins the sympathy of e-mail users as handy interface enables you to forget mail applications installation and setup problems.
As a result e-mail of the Future performs as web-interface without the use of mail applications. Most probably Yahoo.com, MSN.com and AOL will use this model in the future, because such approach better than the old methodic with the using of mail programs.The protocols POP3 and SMTP are also outdated themselves. For example Gmail.com gives you the opportunity to receive notifications about new emails through a special RSS feed.