Emails has changed the way we communicate with each other in so many ways and it has been robust enough to survive so many decades while technology was changing at a rapid pace. Web-based email services brought by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google initiated in a PC era and were all accessible after entering usernames and passwords. However, now we live in a post PC era where mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets rule. Gmail, Hotmail or Outlook, Yahoo Mail and all other email services have their apps to be used on smartphones and tablets but these apps bring PC era email services to mobile devices rather than truly being built for smartphones or tablets.
Russia-based My.com is about to change that by bringing an email service that is truly and solely built by keeping mobile devices in mind. So much so, that My.com will not be even accessible through PCs or laptops. The service is brought by the owners of Mail.ru which is huge in Russia having 100 million users. My.com email service will be tied to MyMail app, which is already among the top 100 free iOS apps according to Distimo, and will have 150 GB of free email storage which is 135 GB more than what Google provides with its Gmail including its cloud storage.
“Historically, email was designed many many years ago, to use on the desktop,” Dmitry Grishin, the co-founder of Mail.ru, said in an interview. “You have emails, you have passwords, and usually in minds of millions of people, if you go to your PC, you write a letter, send some documents to other people. But how you use email is completely changed on mobile. We see that on mobile, we have access to your email always. You can receive notifications of new emails, have communication much quicker. And what we found is the traditional way of email is not working very well for mobile.”
The biggest surprise is that it will not use any passwords thus cannot be used on non-mobile devices. Grishin said passwords are problematic as they can be forgotten or have to be changed frequently or can be stolen by hackers and phishing scams. My.com uses a similar method as that of WhatsApp which uses text-message sent to the phone of the user to authenticate it. The company’s spokesman describe the process in following statement:
“Our approach is good for security. In addition to our no password strategy, using our proprietary protocol and https instead of IMAP, POP and SMTP protocols lets us bring stronger security for our users. Desktop email clients that use these IMAP, POP and SMTP store user passwords, and are therefore prone to virus attacks. Avoiding IMAP, POP and SMTP ensures that @my.com accounts always stay safe from such attacks.”
