Commented on own review
Dec 08, 2002 10:08 AM
Perdon, but I didn't see it anywhere exclusively stated that comparison/debate is not permitted here. In fact, in the About us section, it says:
We provide:
• A platform for consumers to voice their opinions on thousands of products and services that are manufactured by and sold to India...'s 250 million consumers.
Both FM and Hotmail are available to customers in India.
And their TOS states this:'Welcome to MouthShut.com™! An environment that fosters interaction and participation among its members. Members should thus feel free to express themselves.'Read More
Commented on own review
Dec 08, 2002 05:50 AM
Bandwidth a pro because it's an awesome business strategy. I can assure you that no free hotmail user uses even close to 40MB of bandwidth a month. In email or storage business, bandwidth is the most expensive thing. So, with a good bandwidth strategy (which almost no one goes over anyway, except... if one is trying to use the account to send spam), it is possible for the provider to stay in business. Believe it or not, Hotmail has it too, they are just not upfront. Hotmail limits your attachment size to 1MB I believe, which is a way of controlling bandwidth usage. FastMail's method gives the user the flexibility to decide how s/he wants to use it.
About SMTP, did you read the portion about using your ISP's SMTP server, which you pay for and have access to anyway? And also notice that not giving Guest accounts FastMail SMTP access is a very sound tactical move to deter spammers.
All major clients are and/or becoming IMAP compatible. What makes IMAP better than POP is that you can access all the folders of your account through either an email client or web interface all the time. And my point was that Hotmail's OE integration uses proprietary technology from Microsoft so as to limit the user's choice.
What is utter crap, in my humble openion, is that Hotmail is actually being compared to FastMail, when FastMail is clearly far far superior.Read More
Reviewed Fastmail.Fm
Dec 08, 2002 04:44 AM
10108 Views
(Updated Dec 08, 2002 07:01 AM)
I decided to make this a post of its own since the responses do not seem to be clearing the air. Ok, let me state it again in reference to FastMail and Hotmail: Hotmail does NOT provide SMTP. If it did, someone would already have come up with a response to Robert's demand to tell him how to conf...Read more
Commented on Lentini's review
Dec 07, 2002 04:39 AM
OK, I'll admit, I was wrong about MailServices. It does have a $14.95 lifetime account with 25MB of space. Sorry about that. But I stand by my comments about Hotmail and FM.
Commented on Lentini's review
Dec 07, 2002 04:03 AM
[... continued from previous post]
The reason mostly good things about FM is posted there is because it is a terrific service! You have to remember that FM has no benifit advertising through the forum, since people there are mostly already account holders of FM.
Mailservice.ms seems like a go...od service. But their free service seems a whole lot like that of FM's (they don't give you SMTP access for free acounts either, again, a sound technical approach.). Their only extra is mail from Yahoo. I doubt they can match FM's 'Member' level account though, for which for next to nothing ($14.95 for LIFE) you get 16MB of space, SMTP and more. I'm curious why you had to point out that it (MailService) was based in the USA. Is it because FM's owners are Australians? Just in case you didn't know, FM has servers in the US as well. A great service is a great service regardless of if it's American, Australian, Canadian, European, African or Asian.Read More
Commented on Lentini's review
Dec 07, 2002 04:01 AM
Lentini,
Let's take it point by point, shall we? Hotmail has nearly all the features of free FastMail? Let's see. The free 'Guest' account in FM allows 10 MB of storage, free hotmail gives you a stinking 2. If you want to pay $19.99 a year to Hotmail for what you get for free in FM, who am I ...to argue! Hotmail's offline access is merely a way of tagging hotmail along with their propriatary products (Outlook and OE) to lock people into their email products using their vast hotmail user base. FM, on the other hand, will give you access over any client that is IMAP compatible. And guess what the solution is if you want to get your Hotmail mails in a different clinet than OE or OL? Well, FastMail to the rescue! Get a fastmail account, and pull your emails from your hotmail account there, and get any IMAP clinet for FM!!! And btw, you CAN configure your mail client to send deleted messages to trash rather than crossing them off, if you so desire. Hotmail lets you send mail using Microsoft products, fine. And yes, FM does not provide SMTP (IMAP never 'sends' mail, btw) to free accounts to prevent abuse of their network. Besides, I'm sure your ISP has an SMTP server that you can use with any email account in any email client. Bandwidth limit is a very sound move. The 40MB/mo. provided for free accounts is more than any average user will ever need. And it's better than Hotmail or Yahoo's strategy of limiting how your attachment/mail size to 1 and 1.5MB, respectively.
And where exactly do you get off by saying that the FM forum is an advertisement tool for FM or that all we do is undermine services like hotmail and yahoo mail? The forum is used to announce new services, and even difficulties and outages, as well as to discuss any problem one is having with the service. Contrary to your claim, the forum welcomes constructive criticism and talks about those issues openly. Many alternative services has been and is being openly discussed in the forum. Read More
