I gave GMX a fair trial. The webmail service is certainly easier to use than the google, yahoo or msn/hotmail webmail interfaces, being uncluttered by ads and clear and clean. In fact I would say it is better to look at and use than Apple’s MobileMe webmail.

But a few things cripple it and mean I can no longer use it myself or recommend it to others. It boils down to restrictive policies supposedly to prevent spam actually disrupting normal emailing behaviour.

1) When I used it as my own main account several clients had emails bounced back to them. Usually yahoo addresses triggered this. It turned out emails were being rejected by GMX servers because they had gone via too many third party servers between sender and GMX. Nothing the sender could do, and nothing I could do either. Not good losing hard earned leads like this.

2) Sending becomes disabled too quickly if GMX think you are sending too many emails and possibly spamming. Address your email to more than 10 recipients and this may also trigger this effect. If you use a desktop email client, the error message is cryptic:
“4.3.2 and see (http://portal.gmx.net/serverrules)” or similar:

gmx error

On the webmail interface the error message is in plain speech:

gmx webmail error

In this case my client was trying to announce his new email address to his colleagues and clients. He had sent four emails, one with eleven recipients, and the result was a suspension of service.

3) Looking at the screenshot above you may just see that he already has 99 spam emails. I had set up the account a couple of days before. So despite restrictive rules the new account attracted a lot of spam already. This makes the situation just laughable.

So, it leaves me needing to recommend a good free email service, but finding that my preferred candidate just sucks. Not sure what to champion next. Recommendations please!…