An Email Service Provider (ESP) is an application that offers services to send and receive emails. It helps you build email templates, manage your contact lists, and send and track your campaigns on a larger scale. Most email account providers are free, but you have to pay for premium features. 

In 2004, Google introduced a free email service, Gmail, which gained the market share and kept enhancing the services by taking the feedback from the users. The popularity of Gmail increased by offering free services to SMBs and became the most popular email platform. Recently, Google announced to charge all the free email services to business users. This announcement made consumers and SMEs look to other service providers to shift. Google's Gmail has earned its spot as one of the most popular free mail services globally. 

On January 19, 2022, Google announced that all business users using "G Suite legacy free edition" accounts must upgrade to a paid tier by May 1, 2022, or the account will be automatically upgraded. Starting July 1, 2022, Google will suspend the account If a user does not manually upgrade to a paid tier or no payment information is entered on the account admin page. The free tier of accounts was available for users to sign up for from 2007 until 2012, at which point they were changed to a legacy status. This will not affect access to other Google Services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases. 

The challenge is who is the alternate provider. This provider should provide secure email services, which will be simple and easy to improve the security of your emails and better protect your privacy. Also, when it comes to popularity and ease of use, there are no beating major email providers such as Google and Microsoft. However, more than a few email providers offer increased security in exchange for a higher fee. 

Even though the email was invented long back, it continues to evolve. And every day, we have new startups reinventing email and challenging the big players. A report says 306.4 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2020. This figure is expected to increase to over 376.4 billion daily emails by 2025. Google's Gmail has become the market leader with just an 18% market share on May 2021 by offering certain free email services with more than a billion users across the globe. 

Now the question arises on what are the alternate and the best email service providers for your business? 

Creating an account with Google, Microsoft, or other big names is another option. A question arises on does any corporate has the plan to introduce the services to replicate the offerings of Google. However, there are more than 10 Corporates are providing email services, and they are: 

ProtonMail 

Zoho Mail 

Outlook 

Gmail 

Yahoo! Mail 

iCloud Mail 

Amazon 

AOL Mail 

Rediffmail for Worl 

GoDaddy 


Features to consider while shifting from Google to other email service providers when any enterprise is not willing to pay the cost designed by Google. Expert says the security features of Gmail are better than anyone else in the industry, whereas this part is always debatable on the type of security one requires.

 
Archive Capabilities: Good free email providers enable you to save, store, archive, and search your messages. 

Security: You should look for solid security measures while choosing a free email provider. It helps you keep your message safe and protects you from unauthorized access to your email account.

Integration: Some email services work fine with other business software like productivity suites and calendars. 

Spam Filter: Spam messages waste your time, and you do not want to read them. Thereby, you need an email service having a system to detect and filter out spam messages. 

Reliability: The downtime of email can result in unhappy or lost customers. 

Storage: Storage is one of the crucial aspects When selecting an email service provider. It would help if you kept in mind that enough storage space is included with your account. 

 
Like any new technology, it took quite some time before emails were popular on the mass market. When they first hit the scene, people didn't trust emails, and very few people understood how they worked.  

The email hosting services market is poised to grow by $ 30.98 bn during 2021-2025, decelerating at a CAGR of 18.84% during the forecast period, and this business will be huge. 

 
By 2025, the number of global email users is expected to reach a total of 4.6 billion - an approximate six hundred thousand increase in users, up from 4 billion in 2020. However, the industry pundits feel that, with instant messages on-demand, email services demand may fall, and there will be a massive shift. 

 
Despite the increasing popularity of messengers, chat apps, and social media, email has remained central to digital communication and continues to grow in uptake. 

 
Let's wait and watch on who will be the next leader in this Email services offerings.