Apexmail is one of these new free email services that has been introduced to me by CIAO. Nothing yet written on it so I suppose its up to me to tell you all about it.
First thing I’ll say is that it’ll probably get a fairly average rating even though it has some very good ... Read review
Advantages: Some nicely laid out parts Disadvantages: A bit slow and jam-packed with not very interesting stuff
Apexmail is one of these new free email services that has been introduced to me by CIAO. Nothing yet written on it so I suppose its up to me to tell you all about it.
First thing I’ll say is that it’ll probably get a fairly average rating even though it has some very good points, it has other woopsie daisies to bring it back down.
It’s actually split in to 4 sections that you get a choice of when ... ...Mail
~ Business Mail
~ ISP Mail
~ Free Web Mail
The only one I was interested in was the free one, and this is the section under which this one comes. The others are ‘pay for’ services I think. Mostly for around $20 a year (roughly). With this one they give you the pretty reasonable 10MB of space too, which isn’t too bad.
As with Visto.com, which I also recently wrote about, this ... more
Apexmail is one of these new free email services that has been introduced to me by CIAO. Nothing yet written on it so I suppose its up to me to tell you all about it.
First thing I’ll say is that it’ll probably get a fairly average rating even though it has some very good points, it has other woopsie daisies to bring it back down.
It’s actually split in to 4 sections that you get a choice of when you arrive at the site:
~ Professional Mail ~ Business Mail ~ ISP Mail ~ Free Web Mail
The only one I was interested in was the free one, and this is the section under which this one comes. The others are ‘pay for’ services I think. Mostly for around $20 a year (roughly). With this one they give you the pretty reasonable 10MB of space too, which isn’t too bad.
As with Visto.com, which I also recently wrote about, this is an American email service that does everything with American figures and names. For example, when registering you’ll find you constantly have to change things around to suit yourself (which takes a bit of a while, unless you’re American obviously). Once you’re past that first hurdle though, its pretty much plain sailing.
Your account is just a little stuffy though if you know what I mean. Instead of having everything set out simple on just a single page, there are scroll things all over the place, which makes it much much more complicated than it really needs to be.
There are advertising bars at the top and bottom, so what you get is basically all crammed in to the middle.
On the left are the main menu bars. These make navigation around the site very easy. They’re always there (taking up a fair bit of space which I’m sure could really be used for other stuff), and are nicely designed. Each thing has a colourful little picture.
They go by the headings of all the usual stuff:
Inbox ~~~~ It is what it says. This is the page they open you up on, which is good I suppose unless you’ve got a filter system set up. The only problem with this page is as I’ve said before; they don’t give you enough space to clearly read what is there. And what is there, you have to scroll down through to get to the bottom of.
The filter system I just mentioned is VERY easy to use. It seems as if they are actually trying to help you be more organised because they leave little boxes everywhere with ‘tip of the day’ and things like that. With these tips, are buttons to take you elsewhere (to a far off land where pigs fly) so that you can easily carry out these tips and make a fuller use of their service.
One other nice little thing that it does is when it tells you how many messages are in your inbox, as well as how many are in your ‘other’ folders. Doesn’t sound that exciting really, just I’ve never noticed any others doing that before. It actually has little of goodness about it really if I think about it, but its there.
Compose ~~~~~~ Again, easily done, just with not much space to do it in! There are some excellent features here like the spellchecker and the easy attachment facility. You can save either a draft or a template of your outgoing messages of whatever you’re sending. I’m not really sure about what the difference is, but they give you separate folders to store each one in anyway.
There are tips and help buttons on hand should you need them, but this part is especially well laid out (apart for the scrolling you have to do). You also get the choice of sending it as HTML if you wish.
Address Book ~~~~~~~~~ I must say, this is one of the sites best points. Names are very easy to add, and also when they’re there, they’re easy to see and use. Just a click of a button and you’re away, writing what ever you have to say.
Folders ~~~~~ They give you 6 folders to start: Inbox, Trash, Sent, Drafts, Archived and Templates. These can not be deleted so you’re stuck with them. You can obviously add more of your own though. This site is very good for the small things like this section. When they can actually do stuff that will all fit on one page, it looks good and works well. Just type in the name of the folder, press save and then its done.
Options ~~~~~~ There’s a lot in this section (so darn it, there’s some scrollin to be done!!). Lots of sections including the set up of your filters, forwarding (where you can automatically tell it to send all you incoming mail to other addresses), autoresponders (that will send automatic replies to incoming mail), bookmarks (so you can store lists of your favourite websites), and other things like that (including a preferences heading). So you can pretty much customise many parts of your account.
Services ~~~~~~ Next one down is this funny little section where they give you a load of totally useless information. It basically looks like a big long (oh no, not again) page where they’ve got a list of advertisers, with adjoining links. Worth a look if you’re living in the US, but not much there for the UK users. It ranges from fun stuff (they say), to newspapers etc.
Logout ~~~~~~ Pretty much self-explanatory that one.
Well, there’s not really that much more I can tell you about it.
They send out mail pretty quickly. My research with sending myself emails to my other accounts was always very prompt. As was the receiving time when I tried that in reverse.
The help files they give you are some of the very best I’ve seen. The only problem with them , and indeed the rest of the site, was the slow speed at which it runs. Moving around in between pages is some times a bit of a slow job, but it actually changes quite a lot. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow.
OK, so my last little point. I wouldn’t really recommend it to UK users. There are many far far better ones available, and you might as well just stick with your Yahoo, Hotmail, or even Visto (one of my most favourite recent finds). They all work just as well as eachother, but these others are just faster at doing it and are easier to understand. So, I’ve given it 3 stars because it has some nice features. I would just about recommend it to those living in the US, but not to those in the UK (or anywhere else).
