"Offering ad-supported webmail is now a game for the likes of Google and Yahoo!, he added."
"Offering ad-supported webmail is now a game for the likes of Google and Yahoo!, he added."
yeah, because hotmail is rubbish
Postmaster will shutter its free webmail service from the middle of next month because it has been unable to win enough advertising revenue. The service, which launched in 1996 and was Europe's first free webmail offering, used to be advertised as "free for life" by former owner Bibliotech. From August 14 users will have to pay …
Providing a "free" service is purely a numbers game - if you have big numbers of users (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and so on) then advertisers will pay. If you haven't, they wont. That's it.
It would take a really big player (say BT?) to try and break into that now.
Personally, I would happily pay a few pounds a year not to have adverts, but I don't seem to get that choice.
What I really would like is to be given the 8mps BT promised me - and for which I DO pay - but that's another story...
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for those wondering about the email spam problem, we used to do daily spam management, then after the board coup those looking after such things were let go. I wouldn't have minded but I came in during my vacation time to give out Christmas gifts and got "leg go"; thanks for the memories.
It is a shame because the technologies are really valuable... or were when perl was a leader in cgi. and their exim management tools where rather nifty.
"Personally, I would happily pay a few pounds a year not to have adverts, but I don't seem to get that choice."
I use Fastmail.FM, which is a subscription email service. It might not be to everyone's tastes, and it has had some major outages in the past, but it now has full replication which should insure against any repeats of previous problems.
It's a major service, with tens of thousands of subscribers. It does also offer a basic free plan with limited storage space - so you could give it a test run - but many of the useful advanced features are only available to those who pay up.
And no I don't work for them - as can be seen from the above I give them money!
my first web based email accounts have been with postmaster, never had any problems with spam, or any other canned ham products.
i have emails going back to when i started with them, they are all there, and as for speed never seen any issues on any of the 3 accounts, its just a shame you cant have a bulk account system ie pay for more than one account, as in relaity i can only view 1 page at once.
Back in 1997, about the same time Postmaster started, I signed up with The Personal E-Mail Company (pemail.net) who promised "Get a unique E-mail adress FREE for life. The latest web-based E-mail service provides you with a personalised E-mail communication solution for the rest of your life."
It lasted about 4 years and then just suddenly shut down with very little communication to subscribers other than a weak story on their web site stating that a serious technical fault meant the service could no longer be continued. It seems rather ambitious to claim your service will operate 'for life' if you don't even have the cash to replace failed equipment.
Thankfully soon the ASA will soon be able to take action against ridiculous claims and unfulfilled promises made on company web sites.
Back in '96, there was a service (can't remember what company though) that gave you "email redirectors" with a lot of "cool" domains, like 2die4.com, rocketship.com, et al. They promised back then that those of us who signed up would get the service for free. And that I did, I even could send e-mail thru their SMTP server, provided I used my e-mail addy set up with them.
SMTP went for-pay sometime around '98. Then sometime around 2000-ish, my "free" service was dropped out entirely, much in this current Postmaster fashion. Thing is, I used that address as my "main" e-mail addy because of its redirecting properties. *sigh*
Oh, if you want to block ads, do what I do: set up a squid proxy, and set it to filter out atdmt, googlesyndication, campaign.indieclick.com and such. All banners will silently dissappear, regardless of what browser you use ;)