Web Mail Services
MSN Hotmail Extra Storage
With well over 145 million users, Hotmail is the largest Web mail service on the planet, but limited functionality makes it more trouble than it's worth.
Besides including 2MB of free storage as a standard offering, Hotmail lets you purchase from 10MB to 100MB of additional storage for $20 to $60 a year. That annual fee also pays for the ability to check up to four more POP3 accounts, to scan attachments for viruses, and to use another 30MB of online space to store digital photos and other important files.
Hotmail's strength is its ease of use. Its sleek new interface places folders on the left and a simple toolbar across the top (though these are still sandwiched by banner ads). You can set your in-box to display up to 100 messages at once, or only those from people in your contact list; you can search messages for keywords; and you can create up to ten simple message-sorting filters and apply them to e-mail you've already received.
But try to do anything more powerful, and you'll quickly hit a wall. We couldn't import a large address book--Hotmail's contact manager maxes out at 650 names. There's no easy way to archive messages or to save them to your hard drive. The $20 version permits only 3MB of attachments per outgoing e-mail message (a $60 account permits you to send up to 20MB). In addition, there's a sending limit of 100 messages per day to keep spammers from abusing the service.
Microsoft has been trumpeting Hotmail's recently improved spam protection. Unfortunately, the service can't filter mail forwarded from POP accounts, and the spam filter for its native mail was only so-so, trapping slightly more than half the junk we received. In view of Hotmail's otherwise limited features, this service clearly isn't worth paying for.
Mailblocks 2
Mailblocks ranked as the best of the Web-based e-mail services we tested. You can fetch and filter e-mail from up to three other accounts, including AOL, MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo, and POP3, or you can use Mailblocks to filter and retrieve mail via Eudora, Outlook, or Outlook Express. It's dirt cheap, too: $10 buys 15MB of storage for a year; $25 nets 100MB for a year. We looked at a beta version of Mailblocks 2 (a shipping version should be available by the time you read this).
Mailblocks offers many of the same features as Yahoo and Hotmail, but its interface is simpler (and ad-free). You can import address books from other Web-based e-mail services, or from Outlook, with one click. Mailblocks handled our 2000-name address file without trouble.
The service does lack some features. There's no easy way to archive or back up messages to your hard drive for later reading; attachments are limited to 6MB per message; and unlike Yahoo and Hotmail, Mailblocks doesn't virus-scan mail.
Unique among the e-mail packages reviewed here, Mailblocks uses challenge/response to fight spam. When someone sends you an e-mail message for the first time, Mailblocks stashes it in a Pending folder and responds to the sender, who must click a link in the message to get approved. Junk e-mail languishes in Pending, while the desirable stuff (usually) gets through. In our tests, Mailblocks didn't miss a single spam, but our Pending folder filled up with legitimate messages awaiting responses to the challenge.
C/R systems may block nonspam messages sent by machines. To avoid this, you can assign a special e-mail address (called a "Tracker") to a newsletter e-mail; this keeps it from being challenged, but you'll have to change each e-mail subscription individually. And you may prefer not to use a C/R-based spam fighter if people resent being challenged (though you can always turn off the challenges, and put up with the spam). Otherwise, Mailblocks 2 is a worthy Web e-mail alternative.
Oddpost
We give oddpost points for personality, but more important, it's a snap to use, has some neat features, and--at $30 per annum for 50MB of storage--is relatively cheap. The service's excellent spam filter trapped nearly 90 percent of the junk, with less than 3 percent false positives. We like it a lot, but Mailblocks checks more types of e-mail accounts and offers better organizational tools. (Note: At press time, PC World was working on a content-sharing deal with Oddpost.)
Oddpost's clean interface gives it the look of a desktop e-mail client, with no advertising. You can check POP3 and Yahoo Mail accounts; all messages are funneled into a single in-box. The program has plenty of intelligent touches. Start addressing a message, and Oddpost fills in the rest; send a message to someone new, and Oddpost asks if you want to add the recipient to your address book. Unlike Yahoo or Hotmail, Oddpost successfully imported a huge (2000-name) address book, though it took about 15 minutes to do so.
The coolest part of Oddpost is its RSS aggregator, which enables you to subscribe to news feeds. Oddpost automatically creates a folder for each subscription and starts filling it with messages.
Oddpost suffers from odd deficiencies. There's no easy way to export messages to your local drive. There's no search function. And you can't move messages to a new folder; you have to create the folder first, then move the e-mail. Performance was occasionally sluggish, even when we used a speedy broadband connection.
Nevertheless, Oddpost has great potential. A drafts folder, virus scanning, and the ability to create rules and to access mail from Juno and Hotmail were all in the works at press time. Like Bloomba, this upstart is well worth watching.
Yahoo Mail Plus
Yahoo Mail has always played second fiddle to Hotmail, despite having a stronger feature set and offering free e-mail users twice as much mail storage space (4MB) as Hotmail. We tested Yahoo Mail Plus, which lets you store up to 25MB of mail for $29 a year ($40 and $59 buy you 50MB and 100MB, respectively), can check up to nine other POP3 mailboxes, and can scan mail for viruses. But since Plus can't filter spam from external ISP accounts, it's a poor choice for most users.
Yahoo Mail demonstrates considerable e-mail savvy: It can display 200 messages at a time and can assign different colors to each external account. Archiving messages was a snap. Yahoo will send reminders to your cell phone for appointments you create in Yahoo's calendar. And you can store up to 30MB of files online--a good way to stash digital photos or backups of important documents.
But Yahoo ultimately frustrated us. Unlike Mailblocks or Oddpost, Yahoo clutters its interface with advertising. We could import a small address book (200 names) but not a large one. We could create up to 50 filters for shunting mail into folders, but we couldn't apply them to mail already in our in-box. Yahoo's SpamGuard stopped only about two-thirds of the junk sent to our Yahoo account.
For a third of the cost, Mailblocks offers a cleaner interface, supports more types of external accounts, and provides much better spam protection.
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