Mail.com and GMX Mail - Free Email Services

GMX Mail, which is also available with slight differences as Mail.com, opens in a new browser window — and into an experience much owed to desktop email programs. You get toolbars and drag-and-drop and menus and panes and folders and rich-text editing and keyboard shortcuts (which can be a tad cryptic).

Behind GMX Mail's polished interface are robust underpinnings: GMX Mail is highly reliable and comes with unlimited online email storage. Its virus scanning is exemplary, and a host of spam filters perform solidly — albeit not perfectly. You can mark mail as junk easily, though, and the filters should learn.

If the GMX Mail web interface is not your thing or, maybe even more importantly, to get your mail into and out of GMX Mail, both POP and IMAP access are available. GMX Mail reaches out in the other direction, too: you can set it up to retrieve mail from multiple POP or even Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts. Of course, you can send mail with your any address in the From: line.

True to its solid desktop email program roots, GMX Mail gives you folders and filters for sorting mail. You cannot, alas, apply free-form labels or use search folders for even more flexible organizing. GMX Mail does include a handy and fast search feature, of course, including a few search operators. Shortcuts to finding related messages — in the same thread, for example, or mail exchanged with a sender — would be nice.

GMX Mail's address book works well and a lot like the Outlook contacts you love — or at least know. In addition to email and contacts, GMX Mail offers a mature calendar and 2 GB of file storage (where you can save attachments, too). The parts could integrate better, though.