Top 4 Free Pop3/imap Services

[miladinoski 1]

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 - https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=mail&passive=true&rm=false&continue=https://mail.google.com/mail/&ss=1&scc=1&ltmpl=default&ltmplcache=2&emr=1&osid=1

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 - https://www.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 - https://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 - https://www.fastmail.com/login/?domain=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://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

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 January 23, 2009 by miladinoski (see edit history)

[miladinoski 1]

BUMP!I updated this post a bit and made it nicer to look and read with formatting. :PAlso 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. :PGMX also refuses to show (download) some messages when they arrive because of something.

[bittr 0]

GMail (Google Mail in UK and Germany) - GoogleŽ Webmail/POP/IMAP/Chat service - https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=mail&passive=true&rm=false&continue=https://mail.google.com/mail/&ss=1&scc=1&ltmpl=default&ltmplcache=2&emr=1&osid=1

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 0]

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