Simple, Fast & Memorable (email.com)

Member Name: campb3ll

Product:	email.com
Date:	10/10/01 (130 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Catchy email address, Fast, reliable email delivery, 10 Mb storage space

Disadvantages: Unsuitable for heavy email users, Premium service is not worth paying for

Yet another free web-based email provider? Perhaps. I wouldn't have looked at it if my email provider hadn't let me down. I'd been happily immersing myself in Fetchmail.com, chortling with glee over the simple, speedy interface and the customizable outgoing email addresses until admin problems wiped the smile off my face. "Fetchmail is suffering from intermittent failure at the moment. We are awaiting for a replacement item of hardware that will fix the problem." Fine - except we've all been waiting for over a month.

So, back I went to Emailaddresses.com - my trusty online bible of free email providers. Noting, with a trace of dismay that Fetchmail.com has disappeared from their list of web-based providers, I decided to check out Email.com instead. I'm a low volume email user and all I need is a few megs of storage and external POP consolidation. Email.com seemed to fit the bill.

First Impressions
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Email.com has to be one of the most memorable addresses out there. Of course, several addresses fit that description, e.g. Law.com and Scotland.com, but [yourname]@email.com does roll off your tongue with ease. The home page looks clean and the sign up process is easy. There's the usual nosy demographic questions but only name, address, date of birth and gender must be specified. Once you've selected a snazzy username and password, you're free to explore your new 10 meg account.

Log in using frames or no frames (the layout is the same in either case) and all the usual features are there in a menu panel on the left hand side - folders, address book, filters, auto-reply, etc. The best features are tucked under "options" and "help" in the menu panel.

The help section is obvious and needs no explanation. There are tons of FAQs available; if you're still bemused, you can also find the customer service contact details here.

The options s
ection contains all the goodies: change password, mail filters, auto-reply, email organizer, external email, auto forward mail, preferences and signature settings. Most of these are self explanatory e.g. password and filters. The "external email" option allows you to specify up to 5 POP/IMAP email accounts for automatic collection. The "preferences" section has the mundane message display options and, more importantly, the time zone settings (make sure you check GMT). The "email organizer" is especially cool; it allows you to colour code up to 5 incoming email addresses and 5 outgoing email addresses i.e. all your emails from your mom can be flagged red-alert so you know which emails require urgent responses! The only disappointment I've experienced involves the "signature settings" option. Try as I might, I can't get my emails to display a handy signature - still, it's not a great inconvinience.

So far, so good. It's all so easy to use, the pages load quickly (my modem averages 32 kps) and the blue and white colour scheme is pleasant. There has to be a catch, and, as always, it's the ads. As Email.com is a free service, there's a button on the home page, two buttons and a banner on the main pages plus an extra button on the "front page" i.e. the one you see once you log in. On top of this, there are two irksome pop-ups that appear on logging in - close the windows after they load and you can forget about them. The advertising is no more insidious than that of most free email providers, although the pop-ups are a bit too O.T.T.

Where's The Catch?
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The catch is always the storage space. Email.com provides you with 10 Mb, which, for me, is plenty. I don't store my emails for long and I don't keep more than a dozen in my folders at any one time. However, I realise that, for some people, 10 Mb will seem like a straight-jacket. The maximu
m email size - incoming and outgoing - is 2 Mb including attachments, so you could be stuck with 5 emails in your account and a hot temper. There are a few ways round the storage problem, though ...

If you're tempted to send huge attachments, you can restrict yourself by going into "options", "preferences" and chosing an email size limit between 20 k and 2 Mb. If you constantly forget to empty your trash folder, then you can set your trash to automatically empty whenever you logout - once again, in "options", then "preferences". If these two simple, cheap solutions don't fix your storage needs, then you're going to be in for a surprise. On reaching 80% capacity (80%! - I never reach more than 1 or 2!) you'll receive an email warning you that you're approaching your limit. On clogging up your entire 10 Mb storage, your incoming emails will be bounced back to the senders.

You don't have to put up with 10 Mb storage space. You can upgrade to a premium account (a standard option with most free email providers). MailPRO costs from $2.95 USD per month or $29.95 USD per year; this gives you 20 Mb storage and email size limits of 4 Mb. Frankly, I can't see the point - if your storage needs are that great, there are free providers who offer more storage. In fact, if you need tons of space, you might as well use a regular computer-based type account as only you can limit your hard drive space.

About The Company
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Prima facie, this looks like a neat set up - a trusty partnership between Email.com and Mail.com Inc. In the "about Email.com" section, they imply they're listed on the NASDAQ - although the keyword "MAIL" seems to belong to another company called Easylink Services (go to http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/IPOs.stm to try this). Mail.com Inc (http://corp.mail.com) appears to be a mainstream global company providing email and
messaging services for various companies. However, once you start following the links, searching for the name behind the face, you find that Email.com is provided by Mail.com, which in turn is a division of Net2Phone (http://www.net2phone.com). Net2Phone is another global company providing internet telephony services in several countries including the UK. In fact, Mail.com has it's own free email service, which is identical to Email.com and ... it's all getting rather confusing.

The main facts you need to know are (1) Email.com seems to be backed by several companies and (2) the main company behind it is Net2Phone, which was established in 1996.

Conclusion
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I've been using this email provider for about a week. They seem reliable and fast. The parent company has been going since 1996, so they're likely to stay around for a while. The ads are annoying but I can put up with them. My emails get delivered safely and my incoming mail arrives without any problems. (Tip: the priority flags - high, normal and low - really do affect the speed that emails are delivered in. Make sure you select "high" priority if your email is urgent.) I think I'll stick with Email.com and give them 4 out of 5 (1 point dropped for the inoperative signature settings and the complicated/misleading trail of backing companies). If you need something simple and storage isn't an issue, then Email.com could be the email provider you've been looking for.

Summary: