Updated October 2026: This post has been expanded from its original December 2013 version with the background on why paid email drew new interest in 2013, what the paid options looked like, what happened next, and how to judge an email provider today. It is a historical account; details describe the time it covers, not today.
At the end of 2013, this blog ran a two-sentence note claiming that more people were starting to pay for email. The trigger it named was a change most Gmail users had noticed that year: Google had replaced its familiar full-page compose screen with a small pop-up window, and not everyone liked it. Some readers went looking for alternatives, and a few of those alternatives cost money.
The compose window was only a small part of the story. 2013 was the year email privacy became front-page news, when two encrypted mail services shut down in a single day and a long-running argument over ad-supported inboxes turned into a public marketing fight between Microsoft and Google. This post looks back at why paying for email suddenly seemed reasonable to more people, what the paid choices actually were at the time, and what the following decade did to the free-versus-paid question.
The free inbox had become the default
By 2013, almost everyone with an email address used a free, advertising-supported service. Google said in June 2012 that Gmail had 425 million active users. The measurement firm comScore, using its own methods, counted 306 million Gmail users in December 2012, just ahead of Yahoo Mail at 293 million and Microsoft's Hotmail at 267 million. Microsoft was in the middle of moving Hotmail users to its new Outlook.com service, which it opened to the public in February 2013, and by December it was reporting around 400 million active Outlook.com accounts.
Those numbers explain why any move toward paid email was always going to be small in absolute terms. The big three providers paid for their services by showing ads, and in Google's case, by using the content of messages to pick which ads to show. For most people that trade was invisible or acceptable. In 2013 it became a lot more visible.
Three things that pushed people to look elsewhere in 2013
1. Gmail changed how it looked and how it sorted mail
Google first introduced its new compose experience in October 2012: a compact window that opened at the bottom of the inbox, like a chat box, so people could write several messages at once while still reading other mail. In late March 2013 Google made the new window the default for everyone, with a temporary option to switch back. In August 2013 Google removed that opt-out altogether, saying feedback on a new full-screen mode had been positive enough to retire the old layout.
The change drew vocal complaints from users who preferred the older full-page editor and found the new pop-up cramped, particularly for long messages. Then, on May 29, 2013, Google launched inbox tabs, which automatically sorted mail into categories such as Primary, Social and Promotions. Tabs annoyed some users and worried email marketers. Neither change pushed many people off Gmail outright, but together they reminded users that a free service can be redesigned around them without asking.
2. Microsoft made ad scanning a marketing issue
In February 2013 Microsoft launched its "Don't Get Scroogled by Gmail" campaign, aimed at the fact that Google scanned the text of Gmail messages to target ads. Microsoft paired the campaign with a survey it commissioned from GfK Roper, which polled 1,006 U.S. adults in early February. According to Microsoft's release, 70 percent of respondents did not know that major providers read personal email to target ads, and 88 percent disapproved once told.
The survey came from a competitor running an attack ad, so it is best read as a sign of how the issue could be framed rather than a neutral measure of public opinion. Still, it put the phrase "scans your email" in front of millions of people. Yahoo added to the unease in June 2013 when it retired its older Mail Classic interface and updated its terms to allow scanning of messages for features, advertising and abuse protection.
3. The Snowden revelations
The biggest shift came in June 2013. On June 6, The Guardian and The Washington Post published the first reports on PRISM, an NSA program described in documents leaked by contractor Edward Snowden. The documents named major U.S. technology companies, including Microsoft and Yahoo, as participants; several of the companies disputed the scale of what was reported. Suddenly the question was not only whether an advertiser was reading your mail, but who else could.
On August 8, 2013, Lavabit, a small Texas-based provider that offered both free and paid accounts and had roughly 410,000 users, shut down abruptly. It had been reported as Snowden's email service. Its founder, Ladar Levison, said he would rather close than become complicit in what he described as crimes against the American people, and he was legally barred from explaining the events of the previous weeks. The same day, Silent Circle closed its Silent Mail service, saying traditional email protocols such as SMTP, POP3 and IMAP could not be made secure enough to keep its promises, even though it had not received any government demands.
What "paid email" meant in 2013
Paying for email in 2013 usually meant one of a few things: removing ads from a free service, buying a small independent provider whose business model was subscriptions, or getting business email hosted on your own domain. The table below lists examples we could verify from coverage at the time. It is not a complete market survey.
| Service | What paying got you | Price (2013, as reported) |
|---|---|---|
| FastMail (Australia) | Ad-free subscription email; stopped new free sign-ups in October 2012 | About $4.95 to $119.95 per year |
| Yahoo Ad Free Mail | Ad-free version of Yahoo Mail, launched with the October 2013 redesign | $49.99 per year for new subscribers |
| Lavabit (U.S.) | Paid tiers with more storage, plus a free tier; shut down August 2013 | Not verified |
| Google Apps for Business | Gmail on your own domain; business messages were not scanned for ads | Business subscription |
Sources: Delimiter (September 2013), Neowin (October 2013), Wikipedia summaries of Fastmail and Lavabit, Google's December 2012 "winter cleaning" post, Fortune (June 2017). Prices are as reported at the time and are no longer current.
FastMail is a useful example because it shows the paid model was already established before 2013. Founded in Melbourne in 1999, it was bought by the browser maker Opera in 2010. In September 2013, its staff bought the company back, and in announcing the deal it emphasized that it had always taken user privacy seriously and promised a clearer privacy policy. A local tech writer covering the buyback said the surveillance news had shaken his own confidence in Gmail.
On the business side, the line between free and paid also grew sharper. In December 2012, Google announced that from January 30, 2013, free consumer accounts could no longer set up new devices using Google Sync, its Exchange ActiveSync service. Paying Google Apps customers kept it. For people who relied on push email and calendar sync to phones and desktop clients, that was a nudge toward either a paid plan or a different protocol.
Was there really a wave of paid sign-ups?
The original post said more users were "opting in" for paid email, but it gave no figures, and we could not find reliable public numbers for paid sign-ups across the industry in late 2013. What is documented is a sharp rise in interest in privacy-focused email. When ProtonMail, founded by scientists who met at CERN, opened its beta in May 2014, it said demand topped 10,000 sign-ups a day and forced a waiting list. That suggests the appetite was real, even if most of it came in 2014 and later rather than in 2013 itself.
- June 2012
Google says Gmail has 425 million active users. - October 2012
Gmail introduces its new pop-up compose window. FastMail stops new free sign-ups. - January 30, 2013
Google stops new Exchange ActiveSync device setups for free consumer accounts. - February 2013
Outlook.com officially launches; Microsoft starts its "Scroogled" campaign. - March 2013
New Gmail compose becomes the default, with a temporary opt-out. - May 29, 2013
Gmail launches inbox tabs. - June 6, 2013
First PRISM reports based on Snowden documents. - August 8, 2013
Lavabit and Silent Circle's Silent Mail shut down. - August 2013
Google removes the option to use the old Gmail compose window. - September 2013
FastMail staff buy the company back from Opera. - May 2014
ProtonMail opens its beta amid heavy demand.
What happened next
Free email did not lose. Google announced in February 2016 that Gmail had passed 1 billion monthly active users. Ad-supported inboxes remained the default for most people, and the share of users paying for email stayed small.
But the arguments of 2013 left marks. In June 2017, Google said it would stop scanning the content of consumer Gmail messages to personalize ads, bringing Gmail in line with how it handled ads on its other products. Its business version had not used message scanning for ads. Encrypted, subscription-funded services became a real category: ProtonMail grew from its 2014 beta to tens of millions of users, according to its own figures. Lavabit relaunched in 2017 with a new encryption design. FastMail stayed independent and went fully subscription-only in 2017.
The original post's observation about the compose window also aged in an interesting way. The pop-up compose window that irritated people in 2013 is still how Gmail works today. The complaint that pushed some users to look around did not reverse the design; it simply showed that even a small interface change can prompt people to reconsider who runs their inbox.
How to decide between free and paid email today
The details have changed since 2013, but the core questions are the same. If you are weighing a switch, these are the points that matter most:
- Know how the service is funded. A free service is paid for somehow, usually by ads or by selling you other products. Read the provider's privacy policy for what it does with message content and metadata.
- Use your own domain if you can. An address on a domain you own lets you move between providers later without changing your email address. That was the lesson of Lavabit's overnight shutdown, when users lost both a service and an address at once.
- Understand what encryption covers. Many privacy-focused services encrypt stored mail so the provider cannot read it, but messages sent to ordinary addresses still travel through other systems. Silent Circle's 2013 warning about standard email protocols is still worth remembering.
- Check sync support. If you use desktop apps or several devices, confirm the provider supports the protocols you need for mail, calendar and contacts, such as IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV or Exchange.
- Turn on two-factor authentication. Whatever you pay, account security depends heavily on how you sign in.
- Keep an export. Make sure you can download all your mail in a standard format, and do it now and then.
The bottom line
In 2013, a redesign of Gmail's compose window, a marketing campaign about ad scanning and the Snowden leaks all landed in the same year. Paying for email went from a niche habit to something ordinary users at least considered. Most still stayed with free services, but the privacy-focused paid providers that grew afterwards, and Google's own 2017 change to Gmail ads, both trace back to the questions people started asking that year.
Sources
- 9to5Google: Google switches all users to Gmail's redesigned compose window (Aug. 2013)
- Google Workspace Updates: New default compose experience in Gmail (Mar. 2013)
- Mailjet: The new Gmail tabs
- InformationWeek: Microsoft: Outlook making progress vs. Gmail (Feb. 2013)
- Microsoft News: Don't get Scroogled by Gmail (Feb. 2013)
- Computerworld: Microsoft tries to lure Gmail users (Dec. 2013)
- Shelly Palmer: Yahoo discontinues Mail Classic (June 2013)
- Neowin: Yahoo Mail redesign and Yahoo Ad Free Mail
- Wikipedia: PRISM
- Christian Science Monitor: Lavabit goes dark (Aug. 2013)
- Silicon Republic: US email providers opt to shut down (Aug. 2013)
- Wikipedia: Lavabit
- Delimiter: FastMail staff buy it back from Opera (Sept. 2013)
- Wikipedia: Fastmail
- Google: Winter cleaning (Dec. 2012)
- Proton: ProtonMail launch history
- Wikipedia: Proton Mail
- TechCrunch: Gmail now has more than 1B monthly active users (Feb. 2016)
- Fortune: Google will stop scanning Gmail for ads (June 2017)
Top image: "Mailbox - by Hey Paul" by Hey Paul from State College, PA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized). Charts by Thank You Robot.
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