I've been using mail.com since early 2002 and I can tell you right now that Yes, I have had a periods of time when the service was crappy and I couldn't access my email for a day or two. But a quick, menacing threat to customer service gets their butts in gear fast enough and then it's great again.

People complaining about the ads need to realize one thing before they target mail.com alone. ALL email providers features ads now unless you PAY a premium to NOT see them. For $10/yr. I never have to worry about seeing ads, having a mail.com signature on my emails or having my account be deleted for inactivity. And don't be fooled by Gmail...Google has ads and in fact they're worse - they actually read your emails to determine what things you are interested in. That's creepy.

Also, if you're a premium user you're treated better by customer service! It makes sense!

Finally, having a simple @mail.com or @email.com address is soooo much better than having @hotmail/@yahoo/@gmail/@lycos/etc. It sounds professional, is easy to spell and memorable. To me, the extensions alone are worth the "hassle" of whatever may happen to the service...which in my case is rare, if ever.

Stop being cheap and you'll get better service.

Sadly, the ratings are correct, and those of us who have used it for years suffer amazing amounts of spam leakage (I emailed customer service to confirm the spam blocker was on- often losing important messages in spam barrages). I have other accounts, none of which come close in this department. They are losing lots of money by providing an unreasonably poor product. I'd pay for an upgrade if they
got rid of the spam.

The portal for Mail.com annoys me for some reason, but I did appreciate being able to choose any of a number of extensions for my account (my favorite was @mad.scientist.com). Also, you can not use this program with a desktop mail client (as far as I could find), which made it totally useless for me except as a junk mailbox.

Very bad when it comes to sending pics through email.

This was the first email service I used for personal email in the mid-1990s. I used it regularly until they "upgraded" the service. I then found that they had lost all my emails. I spent months in futile correspondence with them as they promised to restore the lost emails. In the end they told me in 2001 that they were unable to do so. I am still trying to get them to admit to having lost my vital information, but they now say, sorry, that was several years ago, so they won't do anything. This company seems to have no sense of responsibility towards its customers. I later switched to Yahoo! and have been using it daily for several years. Yahoo! has kept all my messages through several upgrades. On the other hand, as I stopped using the Mail.com service they deleted even my recent messages, which they say they do if you don't log on for 60 days.

5 Days and No Email? The site seemes to have fallen off the face of the earth for the second time in about a year. Every site keeps multiple email addresses on file. Nearly a week has passes and the mail.com team has not bothered to tell us when the site will be up and running again. F- the people who blaim this sites lack of preformance on it being free. Try GMail it will never disapear, show you a pop-up, or tell you that your box is over quota.

One word Sucks ass... I am on this site, for the simple reason that I cannot access mail.BullS.. I am one of thos who is too lazy to switch over. But this has done it for me. Asta la vista Mail.com

MAIL.COM SUCKS. I had four sites with this fourth world company up until today. In have not been able to access one of my accounts for four day now. I have sent in 5 trobule reports and all I get is their automated reply. There is no way to contact a human to get a resolution. Two of the other accounts have become so laborious to access that it is not worth the effort anymore. Again, I have sent in comments regarding this issue and same result - the automated response. Go to Lycos, Yahoo, or Operamail. You can get in touch with a human at these sites if you have a problem. It would be worth the effort to start a campaign to put mail.com out of business except they would just start another schlocky service under a different name.

Totally sucks. And don't assume that a premiums service gets rid of the ads - read the fine print. I bought a forwarding service - but using the webmail still the same as free, slow as death with pop-ups and the damnable thanks/no thanks pages.

I very much dislike mail.com. As a matter of fact, it completely sucks. When I initially signed up with this free email service, it was good. As time went on, however, more and more flashing banners with half naked folks started to appear, and the service started to slow considerably. Then, while checking my mail one day, I was redirected to a page full of banners that demanded my attention by making me have to click a "no thanks" button before proceeding (excruciatingly slowly) to the message that I actually wanted to go to before being hijacked. I decided to write this post when I needed to find a single email from a particluar individual that was sent to my old mail.com account about 1 year ago. I do not use mail.com now (except for a drop box), but I needed the information contained in that single email. Well, I had more than one email from the individual. After I did a search and mail.com took it's 5 minutes to pull up all of his emails to me (I have a broadband connection, by the way) I had to go through each individual email in order to find the right one. I would look at the email, then have to click my browsers back button to go back to the list of emails from this one person. Well, every time I try to go back to the list, I get that stupid page full of banners with the "no thanks" button on it. And would you like to guess what happens when I press the "no thanks" button? I get redirected to my inbox and have to do the 5 minute search thing all over again. After about 20 minutes of what could only be described as "what the devil does to those who go to heck" (I don't actually believe the devil does anything to people in heck), I finally located the correct email, fell on my knees and praised the god of technology for directing me away from this email provider the year before. Sure, it's a free service. But I would strongly encourage anyone considering signing up with this provider to go somewhere else. I have a free gmail account that blows mail.com's doors off. Even yahoo! has a better mail program (not as good as gmail though). I use my old mail.com account as a drop box only, when I need to sign up for something but don't wish to get spammed (like when I signed up @ rateitall.com so I could submit this review) I think the only people who still use mail.com probably only do so because they do not have the time to switch over to another service, or have been using it for so long they do not realize that there are other free email providers available that don't stink.

Looks like they have gone bust. The site has been completely inaccessible for days now.

The Yugo of e-mail providers. . .

Reading these reviews makes me wonder if I'm using the same service. I've been using mail.com as my primary email for over a year now with no problems whatsoever. It loads fast, has excellent options available, has never once been down (it's accessed several times daily) and no mail has been lost in or out. True it has ads that you must click through but it is a free service. I am so satisfied that I will upgrade to one of their premium packages and then...no more ads. If I am somehow unsatisfied with the premium account I will edit this review. But as it stands, mail.com has been my best email account to date- and that includes the ISP provided ones. Recommended.

Worst service ever. If I could give it no stars I would. I would like to cut my losses and get a new email account but I have been unable to even acces the mail.com homepage for 5 days now to get my address book. All incoming email are being returned to sender as undeliverable.

This is absolutely the worst email service I have ever used. Period. Slower than plate tectonics. I was essentially trapped into using it - started an account before they became a pay service, and I had already put the "mail.com" address on business cards, etc. So I had no choice. Isn't there anything illegal about that by the way? Seems like it should be - they essentially have next to zero incentive to improve their service since all of the free (original) subscribers are belted in. I would really like to figure out how to start a class actions suit against this company. Any bored lawyers out there???

The site STILL sucks! I was also forced into it after they bought out Iname. People always tell me their mail gets bounced back as undeliverable. The site is always down for maintenance. Banners and popups fill your screen. And slow would be good at this point! Try Yahoo?

I was forced into using mail.com after they bought iname.com. I had been using the same email address for ages, so kept with it. The site is horrible now, full of pop up ads and vibrating banner ads that attract your attention away from your mail, or just annoy you when you are trying to do something. The site is slow as death, I get a lot of complaints from people that mail gets bounced. Overall it's an annoying site that hopefully will end up getting bought by someone who knows how to run it. Avoid!

Horrible, too many ads.

It's never available, popups and junk. Very unreliable. Hotmail is better

I currently use mail.com as my primary email address. It is almost as fun as stepping on a rusty nail. You get a click-thru ad whenever you try to open a message. Just opening the site brings up about 4 pop-up ads. It is EXTREMELY slow, especially when sending attachments. All-in-all I'd say it rates right up there with getting your pubic hair caught in your zipper.

A spammer's heaven.

I always seemed to get spammed by people with Mail.com accounts. Probably totally coincidental, and this is probably an unfair rating, and in the nature of full disclosure, I have never used this service and never will. I am just tired of the Mail.com trolls.

Mail.com is a great personal mail service. I like the way the site looks and the navagation is quite simple, alot like yahoo mail. I also like the fact that it can display all the avalible folders for you on the side bar. The message retrieval is nice and the options for viewing are powerful and simple. You can define how many messages that get shown on 1 page, thta makes it customizable for those who want to load just a few at a time can don so without slowing the internet connection down. If you want to view all your messages you can do so by getting into your preferances.The options are very nice and they give you alot for being a free service. I really like the fact that it has a 20MB mailbox and it allows you to have as many folders you want in your account. The only gripes I have are that they have the site under construction quite frequnetly and I can't access my account whenever they have a site problem. They do need to leave things alone with thier servers. I also think they need to decrease the amount of advertising on the site. I don't need to see 4 pop-ups and 3 ads on ths site. It bogs down the connection but Mail.com is great mail provider and I love the service there!

As I understand it, Mail.com was bought by Net2Phone and then everything went wrong. I had problems with both of my accounts, which are set to be forwarded to my current ISP. On my first account, some messages were lost and others took a couple of days to get through their servers. To their credit, this account is now working normally. However, my second account is not working correctly, which has caused many messages to be forwarded to an obsolete address. Their servers seem to be ignoring my setup instructions. I respect that they are admitting their problems in their FAQ, but their problems have gone on for months and it takes a long time to get anyone in support to answer. I give them a bad rating instead of terrible because one account is working properly.

Good but not great is probably the best way to describe this service. Here's the thing it's free E-mail so that's great! and you can access it from anywhere and choose the second half of your address from a long list of domain names that they own such as Jack@usa.com or Jack@dentist.com or Jack@mail.com etc. etc. a lot of the names are personalized to careers etc. So all of that is great and all and maybe I'm being a little overpicky here but they are ssssoooooo slooooooow. It's like signing on is an eternity and sending an E-mail? Forgeda bout it. You can almost see each individual byte as it transfers. Overall a very good service and certainly useful, just slow.