If You Must Pay For Web Email, It Might As Well Be Good...
from the good-timing dept
As all of the free web email services start adding "premium services" that they're charging for, it's becoming apparent that these aren't really "premium" services. Obviously, some of them are, but they're also starting to charge for aspects that used to be free. This tends to piss off users - to give something for free and then suddenly take it away. Predictions are now that if you want free web email, you're only going to have minimal features. So, maybe there's room for new companies providing quality for pay web email services. If you're going to pay, you might as well pay for quality - and not pay the idiots who promised you free, and then took it all away. At least that seems to be the mindset of people using Oddpost - the for-pay email system discussed in the article. They're offering a somewhat better offering, and they get to steal users who are pissed off at their former provider - but who have come to accept that they need to pay.
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some quality
The site isn't even up.
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No Subject Given
Oddpost has been getting a fair amount of press recently, and it looks like a pretty decent service (one of those 300 new signups was me poking around).
It has a little problem, though, which I think is representative of the problems that occur when you try to reproduce an application with the Web: Oddpost only works if you're running IE5+ on Windows -- if you use any other browser or operating system, you a directed to a page that points you to mail2web's email tool (I don't know whether the companies are related).
All of the cool features that oddpost offers are DHTML-based; having been down that development road myself I don't blame them for giving up on any pretense of cross-browser/OS compatibility, but it's a potentially significant limitation.
Oddpost could end up with their own crop of pissed off users if enough people go on a trip and suddenly find themselves using mail2web instead of the service that they're paying for. Or worse yet, the "error connecting to host" messages from mail2web that I've been encountering...
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Re: No Subject Given
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