The latest issue of PC World magazine has a two-page advertisement for Inbox.com, an email provider that boasts 5GB of storage space. After reading the features, I decided to signup and give it a try.
Key Features
- 5GB of storage and 20MB attachments
- Photo storage and sharing
- Pop3 access
- Calendar with email reminders of appointments, birthdays, etc.
- Spam and virus protection
- No ads in the inbox
I initially really liked the layout, speed, and lack of ads in the GUI. This was a big change from Yahoo! Mail, which I’ve been using for years. Yahoo’s Beta seems a little sluggish and the ads are irritating. However, Inbox is missing one important feature that Yahoo! recently added; the ability to drag and drop mail into different folders.
Inbox does support a conversation view on emails, allowing you to view back and forth emails between you and another person in a running list. That seemed like a nice feature, but proved to be pretty useless.
My biggest complaint, and the reason that I am sticking with Yahoo! Mail, is the complete lack of customer support. Their website claims that the customer is important and that they will reply to all questions/comments within 2 business days. It took 10 days to get a reply to a support question, and the reply did not come close to resolving my problem.
Bottomline: I do not recommend Inbox. They are relatively new, which means there is a possibility that they may go belly-up at any time. Their features are great, they provide lots of storage, and are easy to use, but Yahoo! provides many of the same features, plenty of storage, and the added bonus of being the largest provider of free webmail on the planet. However, customer support is the main reason I will not be using Inbox. I know from experience that Yahoo! has excellent customer service. Email is far too important to trust to a company that doesn’t even care if you exist.
15 Comments
Ok, I’m using Inbox.com since January 2006. It’s just keeps getting better and better. They have plenty of free software to use with email, protect computer…check Inbox.com products. I give them 5/5.
I am still a bit weary of inbox.com. I think tis cool and everything, but are they going to disappear? I did some googling and there are tons of simliar sites.
Such as Crawler.com which offers the same email, you can even login tiwh tyou inbox.com email account there, so its the same company.
They all are apart of the http://www.xacti.com Xacti Group. or whatever.
I read that they could be spammers. AFter a while you might start getting spam? Who knows. But maybe we should wait a bit on fully using them.
I got a good email addy with them though
oh yeah btw, I had a problem with the timestamps on the emails (if you import pop mails from like google, it’ll put the time stamp on it of the day you imported it, and not the original date you got the email, but you can goto print view to see the original date)
and i submitted a ticket on if there was a way to make it show the actual date. Took them about a day or so to reply. Wasnt that bad of support in my opinion.
I’ve been fairly happy with inbox.com for more than a year. However, what really bugs me is the erroneous Date Taken they manage to give to each picture in the Photo section. It is NOT the original date for the picture and no amount of complaints would get their attention!
INBOX.COM sucks! I just lost all my emails and data a few days ago. Do a quick google search you’ll see I’m not alone because their server crashed. I have used almost all major email services (hotmail, yahoo, lycos, aol, gmail). Some of them are pretty bad in terms of interface and usability (like hotmail and lycos), but I never lost my emails!! Yes, I did submitted a “support ticket,” and the reply is basically “sorry, dude, we can’t do nothing about it.”
—-SUPPORT ANSWER(1/16/2008 4:41:08 pm):
We are really sorry but unfortunately, one of Inbox.com server crashed (unfortunately, the server on which your Mailbox resides) due to a hardware failure and we were unable to recover your old data.
We are sorry for the loss but we are unable to assist in this regard. However our engineers have re - created new accounts for you.
This is written in our Term of use.
Inbox.com services are provided on an AS IS and AS AVAILABLE basis. Inbox.com disclaims any and all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services. ——-
The fact that Inbox.com didn’t maintain regular backups of their customer’s data is a good enough reason to look elsewhere.
I lost all of my mail too, and got the same response. I’m using bigstring.com now. Hopefully they do backups.
@ Melissa: Why not use something more well-known, like Gmail or Yahoo Mail? We know they do backups.
Be warned that this service is slow to send outbound e-mails. Testing shows typical delays of 10 to 15 minutes, or longer. E-mail is not an immediate communications venue, like a chat room, but that is too long a delay. The delay can be seen by reviewing the Received headers to see when you submitted the e-mail (also check your own e-mail client just in case what they list is different) to when it finally submits it to the target (recipient’s) mail host.
Also, every outbound e-mail that you send through their “free” service will get spamified. That is, they will append spam onto your outbound e-mails sent through their service. There was no spam signature when using their webmail interface, only when using their POP3 access (which is the only means that I intend to use to provide for local management of my e-mails). So be aware that your outbound e-mails sent through their POP3 server will probably be seen as spam. Lots of other “free” e-mail services do this, too, so it is something to watch for. Personally I never use any “free” service that generates spam “on my behalf”. Free should not equate to spam.
Be aware that their description of their POP3 access is that it is currently in beta testing during which that service will remain free. Once it is out of beta, they reserve the right to change the conditions of its use. Well, duh, guess what that means? When it is no longer beta, they are going to charge for it.
Hey everyone. Somebody plz help me…!!!!
i have been using inbox fer long now, and never faced any problems, but now all of a sudden when i opened my id, i lost all of my emails, photos, and most important contacts, how am i suppose to recover? plz email me and help me recovering my data.
@ asim: I have no idea how to help you. Good luck with Inbox’s support. You might consider switching to a more reliable source for webmail like Gmail or Yahoo.
Inbox.com started out great. But as time went by they became completely unreliable. Often out for the entire weekend (supposedly doing maintenance). No replies by customer service until the second or third email to them. Then one day, and this is what caused me to quit them is they would allow buttons to show on my emails from my ebay sales notices. Each time I received an email from ebay, I’d have to start clicking on the show more details link and then show html link to get the buttons. This was just too time consuming and ridiculous. They were going backwards with ease of use and obviously having major issues with the quality of their service. I really tried to stay with them for a while, but finally had to move over to my old yahoo account for all my email. Inbox.com was a viable contender before they went into free fall mode about a month or so ago. I can never trust them again. To notify all my contacts about a new email address is somewhat prohibitive and time consuming. I dread changing email addresses. But sometimes you just have to do it. Goodbye inbox.com. I won’t miss you. Al
Hi Guys, I never faced any kind of problem with my INBOX.com . I prefer others to switch to inbox.com. I n single page you have all the features like notes, organizer, rules etc. Great web tool for use
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I need to switch email providers and couldn’t decide between Inbox.com and Yahoo! mail. You’ve just made up my mind for me. Whew! Thanks for saving me from trouble!
@ Fruitsalad37: You’re welcome, but I’m actually using Gmail now. It’s even better than Yahoo. Check it out if you still need a provider.