My.com Launches Mobile-Only Email That Doesn't Use Passwords

We last covered My.com back in November 2013. The website, a product from Russian Internet company Mail.ru, is meant to be a sort of do-all homepage. You can check your myMail, play myGames and have discussions in myChat. And now the company is making it possible to sign up for a mobile-only My.com email address that — get this — doesn’t use a traditional password.

I’m sure you’re wondering how that works. I don’t blame you. According to My.com, instead of entering a password at sign-up, users will instead enter a mobile phone number. Whenever a user wants to verify his or her account, a special code will be sent to the user’s phone. After verification, no password is necessary.

It does raise an interesting question: what happens if you get a new phone and your phone number changes? Will you pretty much be locked out of your My.com account? It’s something the company will need to address for sure. But if you want simple, secure mobile email, the My.com approach is definitely an interesting one.

“Email began on the desktop and transferred to mobile without much thought to how people use mobile devices. We looked at mobile email with a fresh perspective, responding to users’ need for a flexible, secure and lightweight way to communicate via email,” said Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin.

Regardless of how a company does email, the market is extremely crowded. My.com knows this. To try and stand out, the service is offering a pretty substantial 150 GB of storage space, compared to the 15 GB Google offers you to share across all of its services. And since My.com isn’t particularly well known in the United States yet, you have a pretty good shot at getting a memorable email address.

You can find the My.com email app on both the App Store and in the Google Play Store. If you try it out, let us know what you think.