Well, my mac.com email accounts (I had several) have been gone for a
week now. The withdrawal was relatively painless, since I started
phasing out my use of them on July 17, the day Steve Jobs announced at
Macworld Expo that the free iTools service, including mac.com email,
was being terminated and replaced with the .mac for-fee service.
And what a fee! Like $100 a year ($50 for the first year for
existing iTools account holders). Some folks argue that it's still a
good value for what you get, but all I ever used was the email. On a
slow dialup
connection (26,400 bps on a good day), which is all that's available in
this neck of the woods, web based services are not very enticing.
I guess a lot of erstwhile iTools users agreed with my take on the
issue. There were reportedly about 2,300.000 of us on July 17. Only
200,000 had signed up for .mac by the extended termination deadline of
October 14. That leaves over two million of us .mac refugees.
MacMail.com Mac-Friendly Email
However, I still have a free POP3 email account with "mac" in it -
to wit: xxxxxxx@macmail.com. A couple of weeks or so back, the always
personable Alex Summersby, Editor of the UK-based MacMail.com an online Mac magazine
formerly known as MacUnlimited, emailed me:
"Thought your readers might like to know about another alternative
to Apple's .mac if all you need is a Mac-friendly email service that
gives you an address that proclaims your allegiances: MacMail.com.
"MacMail offers free-of-charge POP3 email accounts which you can
access via a Web browser or your preferred email client software. It's
based in the UK but offers a worldwide service. I should mention also
that the system is not based on an off-the-shelf engine but has been
custom-programmed to deliver a range of features that most other such
services won't match, including:
- customizable filters and user-defined spam blocking
- online mail management, custom folders and Address Book
- powerful search functions
"It also now hosts the webzine formerly known as
MacUnlimited.com."
Needless to say, I surfed on over to MacMail and signed up for an
account. I've had it for a couple of weeks now, and so far it's been a
great service - fast and reliable. The signup procedure was painless,
and configuration a breeze.
I'm an almost total POP3 user, and MacMail works fine with Eudora,
but the MacMail Webmail interface is about as slick as I've seen -
clean, intuitive, and fast, and it's nice to have as a backup.
As with all Webmail services, you can access your MacMail account,
send and receive messages and attachments, from any computer, anywhere
in the world, so long as it has a working connection to the Internet
and browser software. All you need is your MacMail user name and
password.
MacMail basic services are free of charge. Additional MacMail
services or "Premium Services" cost a small monthly fee. You get
5 MB total server space with the free service, and if you need
more you can increase this by subscribing to the MacMail Premium
Services.
This is a very cool email service, and muchas gracias to Alex
and the MacMail folks for offering it.
Zapo.net Free POP3 email
Another new free POP3/Webmail email service that didn't make it into
my last Miscellaneous Ramblings free email roundup is Zapo.net Mail, which has a quick,
streamlined signup procedure, and instant activation.
Zapo Mail features:
- Easy to remember email address (e.g., xxxxxx@zapo.net)
- Fast
- Correct foreign language visualization
- POP3 access
- Intuitional interface
- Mobility - You have access to your email at any time and from any
place
- WAP access (reading messages via GSM)
- Rich text (HTML) format
- Drafts/Postponed mail
- Address book with nicknames
- 12 MB quota
- two ways of deleting messages
- Read RAR and ZIP archives without downloading the attachments
- Reading Word and Excel content without downloading the
attachments
- SSL encrypted passwords
- Online password change
- Address book import from Outlook, Messenger, Yahoo!, GMX, etc.
- User defined message order; Reply and Forward functions
- Anti-spam filters; Anti-spam real-time Blocking List (RBL)
- Unlimited number of attached files
- Automatic signature
- Encrypted passwords
- New mail notification
- Spell check
And finally, an update to my free and cheap alternative's to .mac
article last month, FreyasLand email no longer
offers free POP3 service.
