There’s a new kid on the Webmail block – GMX.com. GMX Internet Services, Inc. claims to have over 10 million Internet mail accounts, and has attracted 100,000 users in the beta testing of their new webmail service. Built with a lot of AJAX features, the GMX interface resembles Outlook and Hotmail more than Gmail or even Yahoo Mail, and sports 5GB of storage.
Here are my initial thoughts where I compare GMX mainly to Gmail as that’s my primary webmail client.
GMX’s interface isn’t as responsive as Gmail, not that it’s slow, but being a technical user who sometimes can click and type faster than some slow computers can respond, that’s a negative. However, if you’ve ever used any kind of e-mail client before, you’ll find it relatively easy to get up to speed on this one.
There are no ads visible, although that could change if this service really takes off. Obviously Gmail is funded by ads, but they rarely bother me, and I even sometimes find them useful.
GMX’s #1 feature that they tout is their 7 layers of spam and virus checking. Now they are not clear on what those 7 layers involve, and there’s very little that you can do to change the settings except to have blacklists and whitelists of e-mail addresses and to turn off the spam protection. I don’t understand why that’s an option.
GMX allows you to pull in your e-mail from other e-mail accounts and an additional plus here is that that mail gets scanned by their virus and spam filters as well.
5GB is great, but so far it’s not growing like Gmail or close to the 7GB I currently have. I also hate the fact that so many operations open up new windows.
Now is a great time to get in as you’ll probably get the username(@gmx.com) that you want. Overall, GMX appears to be a pretty solid webmail service, although I can’t vouch for their reliability as of yet. However, having become a power Gmail user, what with my Greasemonkey extensions and all, I’m not even in the least bit tempted to switch.