How are email advertisements hurtful?
How advertisements hurt personal users: Common email services like Google, Hotmail, and YMail mine the private information of their users to target these users with advertisements, invading their privacy online. These so-called free webmail services also do very little to prevent spam, scam and viruses from entering a users inbox. While many email advertisements and spam received through inboxes are from legitimate businesses, some of these emails can be from fraudulent companies that may be looking to steal your identity and your money. How advertisements hurt businesses: Business users have a clear commercial interest in their communications. Given the choice, most businesses would prefer that corporate knowledge (i.e. email content) remain exclusively in the service of their commercial interests, but with common email these communications are often repurposed by web media companies for their competitors advertisements.
