You know, I used to talk about how great Big Mail Box was. And when I signed up with this free e-mail service in the summer of 1999, it really was fantastic.

Big Mail Box offers a free, web-based e-mail service for domain owners. I offered @overnow.com e-mail addresses to friends, family and website visitors, and BMB handled all the backend stuff; accounts, mail servers, all that jazz. In the beginning, it really was swell, but it has fallen so far, so fast, that it's hard to believe that the Big Mail Box of today is the same company I was so impressed by a year ago.

My very first e-mail to their support team, asking some general questions about their service, was answered quickly and expertly. Signup was smooth, integration and customization of their pages was relatively painless, and the service was quite reliable.

What a difference a year makes.

In February 2000, I endured what was essentially a month-long service outage. I was unable to log in to any of my accounts for hours at a time, and this wasn't just a problem with my account; I was using BMB on other projects at the time, and they were similarly inaccessable.

Big Mail Box explained this by saying that they had grown too much, too fast, and were adding servers and bandwidth and so on. Fair enough.

However, the problems kept coming. I can count at least a dozen instances of significant downtime, almost always unannounced, since the promised upgrades. Throw in a couple of short outages virtually every day and you have a formula for a lot of frustration.

Typically speaking, when your e-mail service is down, you'll still receive your mail; you just can't get at it for a while. I have reason to believe that I missed mail at least twice during these outages; I can't really prove this, but it's just the feeling I get.

Soon after the upgrades, Big Mail Box started to show a lot more advertising on their webmail pages than they did before. 88x31 buttons were scattered about, and popup windows and other interstitial advertising became commonplace. I suppose this is fair... after all, it is a free service, right?

The breaking point came when Big Mail Box began to attach text ads to the bottom of every e-mail sent from their service. This was done without warning to users or administrators, and no consideration was given to the notion that users of the BMB service might not want to appear to support the products they were (sometimes unknowingly) advertising.

In fairness, I should mention that these text ads were often used only for short periods, usually only a few days or so. Still, these ads were essentially a small bit of spam sent with every e-mail my users and I sent.

I was not silent about my disapproval of these ads, but e-mail inquiries to BMB technical support were treated with disdain. Twice I was told that my only option was to upgrade to their pay service. No compromises were offered, and no understanding was communicated; just pay for it, loyal customer of one year. Just pay.

Yeah, that was enough for me.

Luckily, I had only about 50 users, which is really small potatoes for Big Mail Box, I'm certain. I announced that I would be revoking the free e-mail service to my users, and after a month's grace period, I did it. I had a few people who needed some help with getting themselves new addresses, and I helped them as best I could. As far as I know, everyone's satisfied today.

So that ends my epic tale, I suppose. I strongly encourage you to check Big Mail Box out thoroughly before you sign up with them. Their service is used at http://www.gohip.com ... sign up for a free e-mail account there, and check out the ads and layout of your mailbox. Can you afford to anger your users with downtimes that aren't your fault? Can you tolerate advertising pitches that are included in your personal e-mail, without your knowledge? Are you prepared for whatever else the Big Mail Box marketing team has up their sleeve to make a quick buck?

Luckily, I didn't have a lot to lose when I yanked this "service" from overnow.com. Don't make the same mistake I did; stay away from Big Mail Box.



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