Now there is no need to disclose your personal email addresses to friends on social networking Web sites. ‘Social mail’ is taking off in a big way and the growing social platforms are aiding these new developments. What is a social mail id – you ask?
You surely must be on some social networking website. For instance, notice the ‘About’ section when you log in to your Facebook account the next time. The about section will have your ‘social email’ address mentioned. You name will be followed by ‘@facebook.com.’ Using this email address, people can send emails to one another. This will be reflected as a message in the inbox of your Facebook account.
Many teenagers and college students are riding on the wave of social mail to communicate. Some of them are also using this mail as their personal unofficial email ids.
MySpace, a ‘social entertainment’ Web site, also gives users a ‘social mail’ option. MySpace gives a highly personalised experience and connects people to the music, celebrities, TV, movies, and games that they love. The free email service on MySpace allows integration of social network messaging with an email address to exchange mail. Security options on the Web site allow users to accept emails only from contacts and even block people from sending mails.
There is a way you can send ‘Twitter email’ as well. The Web site, Twitter Counter, allows users to sign-in through their Twitter id and send mails. This is exclusive to users of the social networking platform.
Apart from sending emails, users can also keep a check on their Twitter statistics through Twitter Counter. There is an option to “get more followers” and to “automatically follow interesting people.”
The ‘social mail’ facility may be a blessing in disguise to those who fear hacking. For instance, on Facebook, earlier people could see your email addresses though which you log-in to your account. Here there were two dangers – one of somebody hacking your Facebook account (using that email id) and the second - danger of somebody hacking your e-mail account through the address visible on the network.
Analysts say that the internet space has always seen a mass-migration of users from one email-service provider to another. It started with the Yahoo and Rediff email addresses. Most of us have started our internet journey with either of these two e-mail service providers. Then there was a mass migration of people to the Hotmail id.
It was the time when the Hotmail Messenger and other chat services were on the rise. More recently, people have moved to Gmail and Gtalk is the popular chat service that people are logging on into. Social mails may be the next transition from traditional email-service providers. This is unfortunately leading to crowded servers.
The presence of social mails will definitely not lead to the extinction of regular ‘only email service providers.’ People will still continue to have multiple email addresses because there are many advantages associated with them.
Although social mail may be the new fad these days, but there definitely are security concerns associated with these email addresses. Not all social email id providers have the needed layers of security. The kind of security filters and password-verification offered by the more popular email service providers is lacking in this social mail. Also, these social email accounts are very basic in terms of infrastructure. These accounts do not have folders where users can segregate their emails as business or personal.