Impressions of "GMX" - Nothing to See Here

09:36 am - Impressions of "GMX"

[Edit] I've since found out from comments that GMX is by no means new (it's popular in Germany). It is just that they came into my view by buying up a lot of advertising on Facebook.

I decided to create an account on a new e-mail service, GMX, this morning. I certainly didn't expect it to replace gmail, but I was curious to see why they thought they were better than gmail, Yahoo, etc.

It is all bluster.

I think the simplest way to sum up my thoughts on their service is to make open an e-mail I'm sending to them about my experience:

To: forum-service@gmx.com
Subject: '+' is ABSOLUTELY valid in an e-mail address (RFC 5322)

Hi,

I really would have expected you, since your /business/ is running an e-mail service, to actually read the relevant RFCs, but when I signed up your sign-up page /refused/ to let me give an alternate e-mail address with a '+' in the username part.

Using a '+' is a common way to differentiate incoming mail by to address while still delivering mail to the username before the '+' and is *entirely* legal, as specified in RFC 5322 (see section 3.4.1, and section 3.2.3 for the explanation of atext).

An e-mail address username part is allowed to contain letters, digits, !, #, $, %, &, ', *, +, -, /, =, ?, ^, _, `, {, |, }, ~. That is a lot more permissive than a lot of people assume when they don't bother to read the RFCs.

This is really "E-mail 101". You should not have launched without getting this right.

Incidentally, once I logged in my first impressions were "Wow, this is really slow" and "Wow, this is messy like Outlook, not clean and easy to use like gmail". I think you have a lot of work to do if you
want to make me want to use gmx. Making it look like a cluttered Windows program is a bad thing, not a good thing.

Regards,
Stephen

Oh, and not to mention they're flat out admitting that their system sucks really badly by presenting one, in one of the 2 automatic messages that show up in a new account's inbox, with the following warning:

"To maintain optimal performance of your GMX Webmail, avoid leaving a large amount of messages in your inbox. Instead, move your e-mail to your other folders (e.g., the archive folder or any other folder you might have created)."

Seriously? Seriously?! Come on... that's just sad. Don't launch until your service is worth using, GMX. Also, 11 million users? Where? I don't believe it for a second. I first heard about your service yesterday.