The free email service, GMX.com, is owned by the same company as 1and1 and a number of other independent brands.
Remember that the Secure Surfing Organization recommends that you do not use any mass market free email service as your primary personal or business email account. They are useful for joining stuff or registering with other web services, including forums.
Secondly, before joining any online service, try to ensure your baseline privacy is protected by using an anonymous proxy server. Some services will not allow you to register if they detect the IP address of an identity protection service such as Anonymizer. In that case, sign up with your anonymizer service disabled but turn it right back on.
That noted, if you are going to choose a mass market free email service, then at least for now, we can recommend GMX. It is certainly a safer and more private service than GMail.
Before describing the services provided, we note our caution about GMX because of its incomplete privacy policy and therefore uncertainty about some possible practices that could dramatically change our review.
GMX does not squarely address the issue of scanning user email nor the use it might make of the contents of user email.
This is a serious matter and it is one of our strongest objections to anyone at all ever using GMail for anything other than the most whimsical of purposes.
Our concern about GMX is somewhat aggravated by the fact that it integrates a number of Google services into its own free email/portal service.
We have left a message with GMX asking for clarification on the user email content question and will update this review if and when we receive a reply.
Email platform
The GMX email platform is one of the best we have experienced on the web, with full anti-virus and anti-spam protection.
We also had no difficulty logging in while using our Anonymizer account. We verified it was fully functioning by composing and sending an email from our GMX account and examined the headers on receipt. The IP address inserted as the origin was the IP address of Anonymizer and not our own machine. (Note this only works when you send email through the online / webmail interface. Your IP address cannot be masked if you use POP or IMAP clients to connect to GMX).
GMX has what have become “regular” features such as 5 gigabytes of online email storage but some uncommon benefits, for example the ability to have up to ten email addresses associated with a single account. Email attachments are acceptable up to 50 megabytes, which is certainly much more than you should be trying to transfer using email.
Reducing the need to attach large files to email, GMX users receive a separate 1 gigabyte of online file storage that is not restricted by file type and can be shared without time limits on guest downloads.
Its ease of use is a genuine joy, with some actions available by right-button mouse clicks. Creating a new folder to store email is as simple as right-clicking the Archive folder and selecting new folder. The mail interface also accepts a large set of keyboard shortcuts most of which are mnemonic (such as Ctl-R to Reply) and so easy to learn and use.
GMX offers pop and IMAP access to users and in a rare display of user-friendliness, provides step-by-step instructions for setting up such accounts in various email clients including Thunderbird. The tutorial is perfectly useful for setting up any pop email account — just substitute the names of your servers for the GMX servers.
Contacts
First, remember that the Secure Surfing Organization recommends that you never “Import” your address book into online accounts.
Every service on the web seems to want to get its hands on your full contact list or address book. There are three reasons for this: 1) to mine your contacts for marketing purposes 2) to profile you by using profile information about your contacts and 3) to tie you more tightly to the service through the convenience of having all your contacts listed on their site.
The GMX Contacts function comes with relatively standard features, including the ability to upload a photo of your contact. We tested the functionality and found it easy and quick.
An attractive feature if GMX were being used as a primary contact manager, is the ability to add additional panels of information. The default contains the standard “Personal,” “Business” and “Others” panels where contact details can be added. But the user can also create custom panels, perhaps “Overseas” or “Branch Offices.”
The user can also add as many email addresses or phone numbers to any single panel. We also found no conflict in having different contacts having the same web addresses.
Calendar
The GMX Organizer would be an outstanding service because of its reminder capabilities including the option to have a daily agenda emailed directly to you. We say “would be” because it is not possible to share a GMX calendar.
If you do not need to have more than yourself accessing your calendar then GMX is a very good solution.
