Mail.com Business Services

Pros: For a 'free' service, they have a decent set of options available to you.
Cons: unstable/constantly down and unavailable - forwarding costs extra - occasionaly they delete your mail.

I came across mail.com many years ago; back when I logged in @ the iname.com site. Their email was ...

Pros: It has free E-mail.
Cons: Everything about it, incredibly slow, unresponsive, ad-ridden.

Let's face it; in this day and age, it's not exactly a requirement for a company to grant people free E-mail. However, mail.com is one of those apparently kind and generous companies that would like to attract patronage, as long as you can put up with a...

Pros: cool domain name.
Cons: EVERYTHING ELSE

In life, almost everything that is "free" is worth it. Mail.com is one of those few exceptions.

When I first signed up for a mail.com account about 6 years ago it was great. It had only a couple banner ads, and best of all it had FREE email forwarding. So, since the domain was simple and cool "mail" dot com I singed up and primarily used it to "forward" to another AOL email account. And when it came time to compose an email I would go to the site and do that. (they got my page views then).

Then, it started to spiral downhill. First, they got rid of the free email "forwarding". Then came the threats: PAY or you will lose it!" (which was crying wolf) And worst of all, came the ADS. Not just one or two ads. POP UPS, and MORE POP UPS, POP UNDERS and yes even MORE!!and of course the original banner load. As a dial up user it is a total nightmare, as often I crash my ISP if I close windows before they fully load.

NOT GOOD

Pros: Awesome, professional, easy to remember domains (@mail.com/@email.com)
Cons: If you don't pay $10/yr. for ads-free service, you'll hate it.

Everyone seems to be complaining about mail.com's "free" e-mail service. "There are SOOOOO many ads!" these whiners complain over and over.

Well folks, I've been using mail.com since early 2002 and it is actually the BEST browser-based email service out there.

You want to know what the secret is to good customer service, NO ads and dependability? $9.95/yr.

If you want to be picky every "FREE" email provider out there requires you to look at ads. Some are far worse than others but in my opinions all ads are bad, even Gmail's text ones. In fact, Gmail is the scariest of all because they actually READ your emails to determine what products you'd be interested in seeing advertisements for. FREAKY!

So for an excellent domain name (and a big selection of catchy ones in addition to mail.com/email.com) look no further than mail.com. It'll have a glitch here and there like every other company but if you pay $10/yr. right from the get go, you'll have nothing but a great experience.

Pros: It works sometimes.
Cons: Lost mail, ad-ridden screens, slow, unavailable, ineffective spam filtering.

Adding to the general malaise at mail.com, they've apparently lost everyone's email! They did send everyone a "don't worry, we've still got it...somewhere", but that was a week ago--and even that message has disappeared from my inbox.

"Incredible incompetence" is the only appropriate term I can think of for this so-called service.