Apart from the fact that several billion electrons are temporarily inconvenienced, does anybody ever get charged for sending an email and if so, how much? Or is it so cheap that it’s just included in whatever you pay for internet services?

£7.24

€4.27

I don’t have the answer but there is the cost of the software and the servers – minuscule though once you have a decent user base. The big companies like Google make money from email as they scan the contents and sell the data to advertisers. Some of that is done real time so it shows ads reflecting what you are typing. So the long answer is they make a profit from your free email.

Ask here

It depends entirely on who’s reading it.

If i send an email with a load of pseudo technical guff to a load of semi literate project managers then it costs a fortune in their time trying to read and understand it then even more when I have to field the barrage of questions that i’d already answered* in the original email.

*Occasionally i use words of more than 3 syllables by mistake, i realise that this is probably my fault