3 replies to this topic

[miladinoski]

The great thing in IMAP and POP3 is that you can access your mail without seeing any ads, and if you utilise the POP3 feature you can read them when you are offline using a mail client like Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mail.app for OS X, Opera's M2 and so on...

I'll review the top 4 free services that include free POP3 or IMAP + SMTP services in here (I'll put them in order of features included):

• GMail™ (Google Mail in UK and Germany) - Google® Webmail/POP/IMAP/Chat service - http://mail.google.com
  Lots of pros:
  
  • Offers continually growing storage (over 6GB), POP and IMAP from any address for free! + SMTP
    
  • Fast searching, great filtering and sorting offering the best webmail interface around
    
  • Keyboard shortcuts for the webmail
    
  • Labs features
    
  • Available in many languages
    
  • Starring and color labels
    
  • Retrieves mail from up to 5 POP accounts and lets you use those (or other) emails from your "From:" line - means you don't have to use another webmail interface ever!
    
  • A mobile Gmail application which works on almost any phone which has Java on it (I use it on my Nokia 6300) offering the same conversation view like in the webmail!
    
  • Connecting with Google Calendar and Google chat
    
  • Rich text formatting and displaying of many attachments (DOC, XLS, PPT, PDF) without downloading the attachment (of course a virus scanner is included)
    
  • The most fantastic spam filter that catches 99% of the spam (for me - I dunno about the others ).
    The only cons that I could find are:
    
  • Rich HTML formatting does not offer inline pics and HTML signatures. // fine for me because I hate HTML mails
    
  • Not offering unlimited space (like Y! Mail does)
    
  • E-mail attachments are limited to 20MBs per message
    
  • Weak IMAP implementation Full IMAP controls now available.
  
  
• GMX™ Mail - http://gmx.com
  The good features:
  
  • Offers a great webmail interface and free POP and IMAP access + SMTP
    
  • Retrieving mail from other accounts (WL Mail and Y! Mail)
    
  • 5 GB storage and 50 megs attachments! (YUM!)
    
  • All mail is scanned from viruses
    
  • Drag-n-drop webmail interface
    
  • Rich HTML mail
    
  • Vacation auto-reply
    
  • Address book, calendar and online storage for your files
    The bad ones are:
    
  • Cannot label mail or setup smart folders
    
  • Not supporting encrypted mail
    
  • Slow learning junk filters
    
  • No keyboard shortcuts... and a few other small usability things
  
  
• Lavabit™ - http://lavabit.com
  The features I like:
  
  • Secure and reliable service with a weak webmail and great POP3/IMAP interfaces + SMTP
    
  • Quite solid spam protection and virus filter (though the most greatest filters are only available to paid accounts)
    
  • 1 GBs space for free to 8GBs for paid accounts
    
  • All connections HTTP/POP/IMAP can be secured with SSL/TLS encryption
    
  • Mail forwarding
    
  • Graylisting and DNS black lists
    There are cons too:
    
  • I've experienced delay in the delivery of the incoming mail messages when using IMAP with Opera's M2 (and other clients ofcourse too)
    
  • The web-based interface lacks lots and lots of features
    
  • Lot of the features which it offers are only offered to paid accounts like automatic mail encryption and so on...
  
  
• Fastmail™ - http://fastmail.fm
  The pro features I support:
  
  • One of fastest webmail interface - extremely flexible web-mail interface
    
  • Receive mails with IMAP - you can't send with SMTP and the guest account - SMTP is only offered to the paying accounts, though you can use your ISP's SMTP server for sendng mails
    
  • Lots and lots of email adresses after the '@' in the email adress are available - the shorther ones (with 4-5 letters) though are only available to paying accounts and some only to the highest levels
    
  • Rich HTML text editor
    
  • Collecting mail from POP accounts (Hotmail™ too - but Microsoft® limited WebDAV access to paying MSN accounts - so you have to pay for the WebDAV access of Hotmail)
    
  • Remote images disabled by default
    
  • Flexible filters with automatic reply (vacation) responders
    
  • An amazingly good beta version available! http://fastmail.fm/beta
    There are many cons though:
    
  • Pretty small online storage of only 10 megs
    
  • Not supporting encrypted messaging
    
  • Bandwith limitation (!!?!?)
    
  • Ads in the webmail interface
    
  • The webmail interface looks confusing to rookies // not in the aforementioned beta version
    
  • Lots of features only available to paying accounts - they made the guest account like a trial so you could buy an upgrade (though you can use your guest account as long as you like) - I am saying that because they are restricting a lot of features to free accounts
    
  • Tags in outgoing emails from the webmail interface (I really hate that - thats why I left yahoo and hotmail as my secondary accounts - they are 10th now )

Well... That's all from me, tell me what do you think about these - reply if you can. Have fun exploring the features!

Edited by miladinoski, 23 January 2009 - 01:16 PM.

[miladinoski]

BUMP!

I updated this post a bit and made it nicer to look and read with formatting.

Also I need to say that GMX™ has shown the worst when it comes to uptime because I've had moments when I was refused to access the server because of an 'Internal Server Error' and GMail™ did this too but a lot lot less.

GMX also refuses to show (download) some messages when they arrive because of something.

[bittr]

miladinoski, on Aug 6 2008, 09:30 AM, said:

[*]GMail™ (Google Mail in UK and Germany) - Google® Webmail/POP/IMAP/Chat service - http://mail.google.com

The only cons that I could find are:

• Rich HTML formatting does not offer inline pics and HTML signatures. // fine for me because I hate HTML mails
  
• Not offering unlimited space (like Y! Mail does)
  
• E-mail attachments are limited to 20MBs per message
  
• Weak IMAP implementation Full IMAP controls now available.

I can add a con for Gmail: It doesn't let you send .exe files as attachements in your email.

I couldn't believed it when I saw it. I got an error, something like "this is for security reasons, because executable files can be malicious". And finally I sent it with Yahoo, which doesn't have this stupid rule.

(ok, maybe I wasn't exactly no topic, but it might be a bit relevant for your comparison)

[frozen.fish]

fastmail and gmx sucks why even bother posting it..
id rather try sky.com for nice email names.