Whether you see it or not, email service providers play a key role in your life, personal or professional. They connect us, help us share valuable information, and serve as our digital record-keepers. An email service can significantly impact how we communicate and manage our tasks, if your emails are easy to organize and sift through, you are bound to be more productive and positive in the long run. Given this, it is crucial to select a provider that best suits your needs.
In this article, we will provide a review of the best email service providers for 2024 that you should consider. Read through to find out about their features, benefits, drawbacks, and how they stack up against each other.
Criteria for Choosing the Best Email Services
When choosing an ideal email service provider for your needs, it is essential to consider several factors such as security, privacy, options to integrate third party tools, and costs. But the most important factor is reliability. Users should face minimal downtime, accurate delivery of emails, efficient spam filtering, and quick loading times. Not to mention that it should be able to perform all these tasks without considerable disruptions.
Here are the factors that we will consider when rating email providers in this article:
- Deliverability: Email deliverability determines how likely it is for your email to reach its intended recipient without being stuck in spam filters.
- User Interface & Experience: A good email service should possess a clean, intuitive interface, and offer seamless experience for composing, reading, and organizing your mailboxes.
- Cross Platform Accessibility: Your mailboxes should be accessible and fully functional across multiple platforms, including laptop, desktop, and mobile devices.
- Tool Integrations: Integrations with other popular tools and services should be easy to implement.
- Costs & Premium Features: We hope to keep this list concise and only mention the email services which maintain a healthy balance between costs and the premium services they offer.
Email Client vs Email Service
We understand that an email service is the party that is ultimately responsible for the process of sending and receiving emails, whereas the client is simply the interface through which you interact with an email service. But for the sake of this article, we will be looking at the complete package offered by email providers, including their client and service.
Best Email Service Providers for 2024
Without wasting time, let us get to our list of the best email service providers you can trust with your mailboxes in 2024.
Gmail
As one of the most popular email service providers in the current age, Gmail is widely recognized for its user-friendly interface and excellent user experience. With a range of built-in productivity features and an extensive list of third-party tools that seamlessly integrate with it, Gmail remains unrivaled in the email ecosystem.
- Deliverability: You have absolutely nothing to worry about as far as Gmail’s email deliverability is concerned.
- Interface & Experience: While confusing at times, Gmail does an amazing job of not hiding its productivity features from users.
- Cross-platform Accessibility: Gmail allows users to access and manage their emails regardless of platforms such as Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, or iOS.
- Automation: Thanks to automated labeling filters, you can organize and clean up your mailbox as soon as you receive an email.
- Premium Features: Google offers premium features primarily aimed at business users under the umbrella of the Google Workspace subscriptions, individuals can also expand their cloud storage by subscribing to a Google One membership.
You will have no trouble finding support for Gmail when shopping for productivity tools, whether you need complete CRM integration or just need a simple mail-merge solution, Gmail is the obvious choice for most people across the world.
Apple Mail
Apple Mail, another popular email service provider, is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface and impressive user experience. It is the default email service provider on Apple devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers and managed to maintain its position as the world’s most popular email client.
- Deliverability: As one of the most trustworthy email service providers in the world, you will have no issue reaching your recipients with Apple Mail.
- Interface & Experience: Apple always prioritizes a simple and intuitive design while limiting customization.
- Cross-platform Accessibility: Unfortunately, you will not be able to find incredible support for Apple Mail outside of the iOS ecosystem. Thankfully, there is a web client, and you can also access Apple Mail through any third-party web client.
- Premium Features: While Apple does not offer a business tier for the Apple Mail service, it does let you expand your storage with an iCloud+ subscription.
Unfortunately for power users, the Apple Mail app is catered towards individuals, not businesses. It is a simple mail client that will fit the needs of most people. But if you are planning to use Apple Mail for a business with more than a single employee, look elsewhere.
Zoho Mail
Highly regarded for its robust features and excellent user experience, Zoho provides an email service and client that fully integrates itself with their marketing ecosystem including their CRM solutions.
- Deliverability: While Zoho Mail does have better deliverability with a custom domain when compared to other free email services, you will find that it is not as trustworthy as a service like Gmail.
- Interface & Experience: Unfortunately, Zoho’s UI is rather cluttered, partially because of its nature as a sales tool but also because it has not been updated to a modern experience for a few years.
- Cross-platform Accessibility: Applications are available for both Android and iOS devices, and you can always use the web browser to access Zoho’s webmail client.
- Premium Features: Unfortunately, features such as mail forwarding, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP, are only accessible with a premium membership. While Zoho does offer a free plan for up to 5 members in an organization, you cannot use premium features with this free plan.
Regardless of the size of your team, Zoho Mail can cater to your business email needs effectively. Unfortunately, you would also be entering the Zoho ecosystem by picking up Zoho Mail. If you do not plan to use any other services they provide, we recommend you stick with what you know best and spend time crafting the best cold email template instead.