I have a beef with free internet mail accounts in general. I have one at mail.com and another at Yahoo.com. Both say they do all they can to make my experience wonderful and eliminate spam, but meanwhile, the only part of those services that works flawlessly are the ads. Enter gmail.
Yesterday and today, I couldn’t even log into my mail.com account. However, I was able to log into the beta version of mail.com. Mail.com is the most horrendous email service I’ve ever seen. Back when nettaxi.com offered email, in 1998, it was better — a lot better — than the email that mail.com is providing after some 7 years of technological evolution. That’s poor. Oh – but the ads work wonderfully.
What’s more, when I finally *did* get into the account, there were 37 new messages waiting for me. Not a single one *wasn’t* spam, which I guess is ok, since it’s the email I use to sign up for stuff online anyway, but of those 37, 24 of them had completely unreadable subject lines (foreign character sets), and another 3 or 4 identified themselves as spam and/or “sexually explicit” mail using the standards for doing so.
As for Yahoo, they suffer from the same problem as mail.com. They say they’re trying to protect me from spam, but they’re not.
And why should these companies protect me from spam or *not* deluge me with ads to the point of unusability? The whole point of their existence is to make money, and what you get when you buy an “upgraded” email account is…. better spam protection and NO ADS!!
….or you can just go over to gmail.com and sign up for an account.
I’ve been using it since the beta was launched, which I guess was last summer or something. It’s actually worked pretty much flawlessly. Early on there were a couple of glitches where I couldn’t sign on at all, but I was always able to get in 5 minutes later, which is more than I can say for mail.com, whose service availability record is disgusting.
In addition to being a very solidly available service, if there *are* any ads, they’re unintrusive enough that I don’t remember them right now. I recommend gmail.com. Barring any major unforeseen changes in their service, their unique message handling features and flexibility, along with a great interface, they stand to be the best service around for some time.