email.com

Email.com is a partnership between email.com & mail.com. It used to be part of NBCi but isn't anymore.

Getting started
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It's pretty easy to sign up to email.com - just go to www.email.com and select register. To create an account you'll need to choose your email login - as email.com is less popular than hotmail for instance you are more likely to get the login that you want. Your email account name can contains letters, numbers and an underscore only. Then enter some additional details such as name, address, date of birth, gender and occupation. Select your password and you'll be able to get into your account immediately.

Features
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You get to create folders, set up an address book, auto foward your email to another account, auto-repy to incoming messages, add mail filters, block junk mail and create your signature to include in messages.
When you login you're shown how many messages you have in your in box + how many are unread. You're also told whether you're nearing your mailbox limit size. I'm currently using 0.01% of mine but I only have about 100 messages in my account at the moment.
When writing messages you can choose to use an RTF editor. You can also easily attach files from your computer.

Downside
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I often find if I open a message that I have to try a couple of times before this is sucessful. Over recent months I've sometimes not been able to get into my account at all -this generally doesn't last for long though. It's generally a bit flaky but you always get there in the end, messages don't go missing or anything.
The mail server automatically rejects mails over a certain size which stops people sending you silly attachments. Some attachments are OK such as word documents. On the whole, I haven't found this to be a problem unless someone is attaching JPGs.

Look and feel
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This is really quite basic. You can choose frames or no-frames when you login. Your folders and function options are presented to you in the left hand frame - with you message list or message body being displayed on the right frame. I've seen other people using much more sophisticated UIs - however it's easy to read and to use. It just doesn't offer any 'cool' features.

On the whole I've been happy with the service I've received from email.com - years ago they migrated to another system and lost a load of my messages which I wasn't happy about. They were suitably apologetic and I haven't had any problems since.