Ayamail, Outlook.com and iCloud Mail compared for families

Outlook.com gives you 15 GB of email storage free, which is five times our free plan. If you already pay for Microsoft 365, the ads go away, your mailbox can grow to 100 GB, and you get Word, Excel and the rest of Office on top. For a household that lives in Office, that is hard to beat.

iCloud Mail is built into every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Setting it up takes no effort, and an iCloud+ plan can be shared with up to five other family members. Apple's Screen Time lets parents manage a child's whole device, not just their email.

Both Microsoft and Apple offer parental controls that reach further than email: Microsoft Family Safety covers screen time, app and game filters and web filters, and Apple's controls work across its devices. Ayamail does not manage devices. If that is what you need most, theirs is the better tool, and you can use it alongside Ayamail.

Ayamail is built around the family. One plan covers the adults and the children, with a shared calendar, a family album and shared storage. On the Family plan there is room for six adults and four child accounts with 2 TB between you.

The biggest difference is children's email. From 15, anyone can have their own Ayamail account. Under 15, a parent creates a child account and manages it in the Family Center. Approved senders only is switched on by default, so only the people you have approved, such as family, friends and school, can reach your child. Mail from anyone else does not reach your child. Instead it is passed on to you, so you can read it and approve the sender. The family's own addresses are always approved. If you switch approved senders only off, you can still choose to get a copy of mail from new senders.

We could not find a setting like this in Outlook.com or iCloud Mail on the pages we checked. Their parental controls focus on screen time, apps and websites.

Your Ayamail mail is protected with TLS on the way to and from our servers, and we require encrypted delivery from other mail servers. It is stored on our own servers with Hetzner in Germany. That is broadly the same model as Outlook.com and iCloud Mail: the provider stores your mail and could technically read it.

If you want a message that only the recipient can read, you can turn on PGP in Ayamail or send a password-protected message. Your files in Drive, passwords in Pass, photos in Album and documents in Docs are encrypted on your own device before they are stored, so we cannot read them. Calendar and contacts can be encrypted too.

Stay with Outlook.com if you already pay for Microsoft 365 and your family mainly uses Windows and Office. Stay with iCloud Mail if everyone at home has an iPhone and you are happy with Apple's Screen Time.

Choose Ayamail if you want one plan for the whole family that works on any device, with no ads, and a child account where you decide who can send your child email. You can try it on the free plan with 3 GB, and keep your old address forwarding while you move.