unimpressedI 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
- "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)."
