g-mail.com

I've been using Genie's G-mail at http://www.genie.co.uk for over a year and a half now, and the service has see-sawed from absolutely brilliant to disgracefully poor. As I write this, I have just tried to log in and received an error telling me that my email is unavailable.

Genie offers (or tries to offer) the following (Free, by the way):

Standard web based email (yourname@genie.co.uk).
The ability to forward ...
...information sent to your mobile phone (sports results, music news, stock quotes, etc)

And when it works, it works fairly well. The website has never been up to much - the recent redesign has made it just about bearable, as opposed to unusable, like the previous one. But the idea is great - when people email me, I get the first 160 letters of their message instantly on my mobile phone, and I know to log on to the website to read it ... more

I've been using Genie's G-mail at http://www.genie.co.uk for over a year and a half now, and the service has see-sawed from absolutely brilliant to disgracefully poor. As I write this, I have just tried to log in and received an error telling me that my email is unavailable.

Genie offers (or tries to offer) the following (Free, by the way):

Standard web based email (yourname@genie.co.uk).
The ability to forward email to your UK mobile phone
A mish-mash of information sent to your mobile phone (sports results, music news, stock quotes, etc)

And when it works, it works fairly well. The website has never been up to much - the recent redesign has made it just about bearable, as opposed to unusable, like the previous one. But the idea is great - when people email me, I get the first 160 letters of their message instantly on my mobile phone, and I know to log on to the website to read it (assuming it's not my mother emailing me again, but that's another story).

But, over the past year, I've been on both BT Cellnet and Vodafone, and sometimes the Genie site will send you your messages up to 3 days late. This is completely useless. The whole point of instant messaging to your phone is that it's *instant*. And quite patently, Genie isn't.

They may well upgrade soon, sort their problems out, and so on - indeed, a recent email from the Managing Director promised just such action. But if they can't fix it in a year and a half, when will they?

Overall, though, the email to sms feature is just so cool (and so free) that I'd have to recommend it to people. Just bear in mind, that you're not getting a reliable service (not just yet, anyway).
 

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