[sridharvembu]

(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho) We would invite people to try Zoho Mail. We have come a long way in the past few years, and we are investing in a ton of R&D to ensure we are world-class.

We offer our consumer edition free-of-cost and ad-free and we intend to continue this indefinitely, and we charge only business customers. This is the same policy we follow with our Office suite as well - whatever we offer free, we offer it ad-free.

[icebraining]

Needing an email address to sign up for your email hosting is slightly ironic ;)

[porker]

How do you respect privacy any more than GMail does? Your email isn't hosted in the EU, what extra protection is in place?

[mseebach]

And more relevant - how do you ensure that you will keep this respect?

While I'm very sympathetic to your business model, it's still a loss-leader for your business offering. Can you guarantee that you will never attempt to monetize this (probably) huge and growing dataset? Tomorrow, next year, and (especially) after a private equity manager starts waving cheques with many zeros on them in under your nose?

[Andrenid]

This is the clincher for me. Anyone trying to compete with Google needs to be up front and detailed about how they handle your privacy, and what they'll do to protect you.