Anyone interested in running a business should steer clear of Earthlink email services...unless you need your business to go under. I have an opt-in mailing list of about 700 recipients, my mails are severely delayed or lost completely and I agree with the other reviews here, ineffectual customer service that does not appear to be trained to deal with these issues. I am finished with earthlink and moving on as of the end of this billing cycle.

I too, have been an Earthlink subscriber for many years. Fortunately, based on the other postings, I have not had a serious tech issue with Earthlink. Of course, I am primarily using EL as my web mail. My complaint is that I am paying for their web mail and within EL's web mail interface I have to deal with stupid BANNER ADS. WHY? I could understand if I was using a free service like Yahoo, gmail, etc. but I pay for this service and still have to put up with BLINKING BANNER ADS while trying to read my web mail. I submitted a customer suggestion to EL but just receive a generic "Thank you for your comments" type reply. Yeah it does look like the Earthlink of old is gone! They lost what made them great, customizing for their CUSTOMER! I too will be looking for another service soon.

I have been an Earthlink email customer for over 10 years. Today I spent 6 hours on the phone with them trying to solve one simple problem. I could not believe their lack of understanding or interest in solving my problem. Life is too short to deal with such incompetence. I have just set up a free gmail email address and will test over the next few days. If things go as well as the gmail reviews indicate then it will be an easy decision to drop Earthlink after 10 years.

Everything is OK until something goes wrong, and then it's like they 1) Don't understand English, 2) Don't have any idea what needs to be done, 3) They simply don't care.
Earthlink, as a system and engineering point seems to work most of the time, but they've given the "keys to the castle" to a bunch of morons.
Earthlink will soon topple of it's own incompetence in "customer service" from Bangladesh, Indonesia, or India.
Their old PPPoE protocol is out of step with the rest of the planet, a carry-over from dial-up, and they don't even know they have it, making troubleshooting impossible.
Every "fix" takes about a month, and it usually involves some "expert" who is not associated with earthlink.
All in all, after over ten years of service, I quit. I am simply giving up.
Now I have to deal with my email address change from every friend, family member, contractor, convention center, customer, military organization, city, vendor, supplier, utility and magazine on the planet I have touched in the last ten years. Nuts.

I have to deal with earthlink all day at work and hate earthlink. I can send a message to myself and it takes 2 hours to come back to me.

sometimes when I get connected to the internet, I am not allowed to read my email.

DSL is new to this area and I signed on with Earthlink. With Earthlink DSL I cannot video conference with any program (yahoo, msn or net message). Earthlink refuses to help saying there is nothing wrong. A PC doctor confirmed that my computer (a year old Dell 8400 XP) is fine and plugged it into their server. The video and audio conferencing went fine, and the PC doctor suggested that it was the Earthlink modem or Earthlink DSL line. I called back Earthlink today. Earthlink is still determined that there is nothing wrong on their part and their tech today said that the problem was definately my sound card. Can you believe it? I've spoken with 7 Earthlink staffers in 2 days none of whom have accepted responsibility and each have difinatively put the blame on my system or the phone company. I am surprised that none of the Earthlink staff have suggested Sun Spots or Mount St. Helens as the culprit. Earthlink has even refused to send a new modem for me to try. I'm switching to a local wireless service in a few days. Its worth the time and money to end my frustration, when after a $250 PC diagnostic bill I know I'm right and Earthlink is wrong. Earthlink's Support Staff either refuses to listen, are ignorant or untrained, or are simply incapable of doing anything to correct the problem. THat makes me wonder what Earthlink's management tean is all about! Because of that, I missed my grand nephew's 3rd birthday party in Hawaii. My nephew, his Daddy, is awaiting orders to serve in Iraq. They are a long way from home. Sign me, OVER EARTHLINK IN ALBUQUERQUE!

Really lousy. Periodic sign in issues, ridiculously slow, and not much storage space. Comparable performance to Hotmail, except it's not free. The only thing that I like is the spam tools. I would dumpt this account and move full time to gmail if it wasn't such a hassle to spread the word about a new email address.