Webmail revolution may be closer than you think

May 4, 2009 14:53 GMT  ·  By

GMX, the latest comer in the world of webmail, has released its services to the UK and US market for more than a year now and the team has made great progress based on the feedback from users worldwide. It comes out with appealing features that exceed the offer of leaders of the market such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo!.

After reviewing the possibilities available in the GMX webmail service we've taken the matter further and came up with a set of questions designed to shed more light on the webmail service that has the potential to out-webmail the top dogs in the business.

GMX comes with an impressive feature list that does not comprise advertising (so you get a clean and clear view of your inbox), but includes third-party inbox collector, 1GB file storage, 50MB file upload, 5GB of inbox, POP3 and IMAP support, as well as drag and drop email organization.

Eva Heil, managing director at GMX Internet Service Inc., has been kind enough to provide an answer to our questions and explain the ups and downs revealed during our testing of the service. Among the GMX subjects tackled below we number alias forwarding (up to 10 addresses are permitted for each user), spam, file storage options and experimental features.

Softpedia: Alias forwarding is by far the most important issue in GMX. That's because once the user deletes an alias from the list, there is no way to get it back without the help of GMX support. When do you intend to fix the issue? More importantly, what would be the solution of choice to benefit both the user and the company?

Eva Heil: If a user chooses to delete an alias, it is removed from the account and put on an anonymous block list for a few months. This ensures nobody can register this alias and receive e-mails originally sent to the first owner. To protect our user’s privacy we cannot allow registering that alias to another account to avoid the above. We’ve received less than 10 user requests within the last year regarding this topic and decided to improve our communication for it.

Before deletion of an alias we explain to our user that they could also use GMX Mail Collector and a filter rule to forward all incoming e-mails for an e-mail address to another account. This includes the ability to send from that new account using the forwarded alias as sender address.

Softpedia: Spam is a nagging problem with any inbox, but in the case of email clients the user has the possibility to put a spam-fighting piece of software to work and thus relieve the inbox of a good chunk of spam. In the case of webmail this type of protection falls into the hands of the service provider. We noticed in GMX that some valid mails had been filtered as spam and missed the inbox. What is your solution for ridding the inbox of unwanted and sometimes dangerous messages as well as avoiding as many false positives as possible?

Eva Heil: The AntiSPAM system of GMX is based on over 10 years in-house experience as one of Europe’s biggest freemail service providers. With over 98% hit rate we believe we offer free spam protection similar to professional, paid for services. It consists of a 7-fold filter system. The biggest part does the general filtering for all users dealing with massive spam attacks. In addition to this, GMX offers a content filter individually for each account that is trained each time a user hits the “SPAM” or “No SPAM” button. Additionally, each account contains a personal black- and white-list that overrules all other filters. (More information here).   If an e-mail address or domain is placed on this list (manually or automatically each time “SPAM” or “No SPAM” is clicked) it will arrive 100% in the inbox (white-list) / in the SPAM folder (black-list). Feedback from our users indicates that the majority are very satisfied with the automatic filtering and power users praise the options to configure their account regarding their needs.

Softpedia: Currently the spam of third-party mailboxes is deposited in GMX's spam folder. Marking some emails here as not spam will automatically send them to GMX inbox folder. Is this a bug or a feature?

Eva Heil: This is an unsolved usability issue we are aware of and are currently addressing.

Softpedia: Currently the GMX webmail service is compatible only with two popular web browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) and Apple's Safari. Is there a timeline for making it simpatico to Google Chrome and Opera?

Eva Heil: Google Chrome is already fully supported. Opera support is one of the top voted ideas in GMX Brainstorm. Therefore, we’ve put that idea already into development and will release Opera support in May.

Softpedia: Testing GMX webmail we noticed that file storage section did not show the user transfer-related details such as speed or estimated time for completing the upload. Will there be a chance to add this type of info in the near future?

Eva Heil: Yes. We are currently working on some improvements for the inbox and in parallel collecting ideas surrounding how to evolve the File Storage and the Organize. Following our introduction of GMX User Lab, we wish to get users’ opinions about which improvements are most wanted. Therefore we don’t have a timeline fixed for the transfer details yet.

Softpedia: GMX is relatively new on the UK and US webmail market, but it's been around for quite some time for users in other countries. Was the release for the English market a result of the beta testing of the other users?

Eva Heil: Yes. GMX builds on over 10 years of experience mainly in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. With the two brands GMX and WEB.DE, United Internet, GMX’s parent company, runs freemail services for over 23 million active users (#7 world wide list of freemail services). Beginning in 2007, the company decided to approach the international market and build GMX.COM to offer a product tailored for these markets. During the US and UK beta phase in 2008, the product was heavily improved using the feedback of our users and optimized for these markets. In April 2009, GMX announced its general availability.

Softpedia: Integration of inboxes from other webmail services set a new standard and practically eliminated the competition, giving you the edge over other services. Do you expect a similar move from Google, Yahoo! or Hotmail? If so, do you have a plan for "counter-attacking" and preserving your market share as well as increase it?

Eva Heil: At the moment we don’t see similar moves by Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail. Google currently launches a number of new features that mainly target highly tech savvy users, Yahoo! and Hotmail appear to have a more static roadmap and are mainly working on big integration of their product portfolios. GMX’s strongest weapon is the close relationship with its users and the ability to consider their feedback much faster than the competitors.

Softpedia: The list of experimental features is quite short at the moment, but includes great options. Is there a schedule on developing this area more and in what way: will this be left in the hands of the community or will the GMX developing team be dealing with them exclusively?

Eva Heil: This section will definitely grow soon. New experimental features will be launched on user feedback via the GMX User Lab and ideas from the GMX team. We strongly believe that this is one of the most important lessons of a grown up Web2.0: The combination of thousands of motivated users and a highly experienced team is the most promising approach to realize the kinds of ideas that take an established product as e-mail to the next level.

GMX is pretty amazing compared to the major webmail providers on the market. It is new, sleek looking and offers quite a bunch of useful features. Feature-wise, the service is also better fit than the most important webmail players currently available and promises a lot of flexibility to the users. And judging by the market share Google, Yahoo and Hotmail should really rethink their webmail service strategies in order to keep up with the pace.