If you’re considering setting up a new email account and want a free one, here are my recommendations for Mac users. Get either an iCloud email account, from Apple, or a Proton Mail account from Proton, a Swiss company. Not all free email accounts are the same. As you consider your options please keep in mind things like amount of storage space provided, effectiveness of spam filters, ease-of-use, respect for your privacy and security features offered.

Google’s free Gmail accounts are widely used and have robust spam filtering and offer 15 Gigabytes (GB) of storage. All of this is great. My concern is their track record surrounding your privacy. Remember the adage, if the product is free then you’re the product. Google’s business model has largely been based around advertising and they’ve been known to build profiles on their users and to see these profiles to marketers. This is why Gmail isn’t on my list.

Apple makes their money by selling Macs, iPhones and other hardware products. They also sell services such as iCloud. Thus, while Apple offers free iCloud email accounts they’re betting that you’ll likely upgrade to a paid iCloud account at some point. Free iCloud accounts come with 5 GB of storage space and robust spam filtering. The lowest paid tier costs $0.99 per month and provides 50 GB of storage space and additional features.

Proton was started in 2014 in Switzerland by people who wanted to build a better Internet where privacy is the default. Proton Mail is the best option if privacy is your top priority. It offers end-to-end encryption by default, and doesn’t scan your emails so they can show you related ads. One downside is that Proton Mail only offers1 GB of storage space. This is limited, by comparison. It is enough storage space to store many thousands of messages provided you don’t send or receive a lot of large attachments.

Another significant limitation of free Proton Mail accounts is that you have to use their webmail interface. In other words you can’t access your Proton Mail account using a mail client like Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook. I think Proton hopes you’ll be enticed by one of their premium features and want to upgrade to a paid tier. Currently their least expensive paid tier is Mail Plus which costs about US $4.00 per month. I’ve been a happy customer of Proton’s Mail Plus for several years. If you’d like a two-week free trial of any of Proton’s paid plans please use my referral link, no credit card needed. If you then subscribe to a paid plan, you and I will both get US $20 in Proton credits.

All of the email accounts listed offer two-factor authentication which improves the security of your account. Proton Mail includes encrypted email messages by default.

If you want to use a custom domain name, such as soundsupport.biz or yourownname.com then I’m not aware of any free email accounts that support this. However, Apple’s lowest paid tier of iCloud and Proton’s lowest paid tier both support the use of custom domain names.

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