GMX: Revolutionary Email Service. At Least on Paper.

In an environment ruled by internet heavyweight such as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, GMX puts in an ambitious effort on the webmail front. In fact, several times within the past few days I found myself wondering why some of GMX’s more innovative features (a personal file storage area that can be mapped like a network drive, the ability to have several messages open at once, a resizable left column) haven’t already been cribbed by the industry giants.

These moments, however, were few and far between when compared to the frustration I felt when GMX would inexplicably crash while doing something simple. When you get down to the nitty-gritty usability of GMX, it falls flat on its face: it’s slow, buggy, tech support is virtually nonexistent, and it omits some key features that many users expect from their webmail provider. While GMX has a few great ideas, there are issues that can’t be overlooked. Read on for my rundown of GMX’s pros and cons.

First Impression

An AJAX-based interface makes GMX feel and act more like a desktop email client than many of its competitors. Unfortunately for many users, included myself, AJAX can also makes GMX load and perform slow, sometimes painfully slow.

The interface, while easy on the eyes, is not particularly well designed. Even with no advertisements squeezed in, the layout still manages to minimize your active work area and necessitate a lot of scrolling to read longer messages, even at higher screen resolutions. I couldn’t help but feel that everything was a little cramped.

As I mentioned before, you can set the left column to whatever width you like, which is handy, but don’t spend too much time getting it just right: GMX won’t remember where you put it and you’ll have to adjust it the next time you log in.

Emphasizing the Positive

While GMX provides an email address for you, they really would like to become your one-stop email service. This is accomplished by way of the “Mail Collector”, a pop-up wizard that guides you through the steps of importing messages and settings from other email accounts. After several attempts that resulted in errors, I had a hunch that turning off my antivirus program might help. It did and I was successfully able to import messages and set GMX up to check a few accounts.

At this point GMX gave me a few options that I liked. I could leave emails from these other accounts on their respective servers or delete them as the appeared in my GMX inbox. I could also set up multiple inboxes and rules for separating messages as they came in, which helps in keeping business messages separate from personal ones. Additionally, I could send emails from any of the accounts that I set up.

GMX offers a nice list of features including 5GB of mail storage space, intelligent spam-blocking, antivirus protection, a calendar, an address book, external POP3 and IMAP support for checking from a desktop client or PDA, tabbed search results, and multiple message browsing/composing, but one feature that really interested me was the 1GB integrated File Storage area.

With GMX’s integrated File Storage, you can upload and share files easily among friends and colleagues, but you can also set up your storage area as a mapped network drive, accessible as easily as your local hard drive. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest way is to download the GMX File Storage Manager application. After a brief configuration, it’s connected and ready to go. You can set this up on multiple computers, for multiple users, and retrieve files, big or small, from virtually any computer with an internet connection.

Remarkably (and unfortunately) this is one of the only GMX features with which I never had any problems. It’s also the most isolated from the webmail interface.

Problems You Can’t Overlook

Did I mention it loads slowly? Imagine trying to get through your email routine while submerged in cold molasses. Loading up the GMX interface sometimes took up to a minute, an eternity compared to speedy competitors. Switching between tabs would occasionally take just as long. No matter which browser I was using (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, etc.), it was still slow.

The worst performance by far was with Internet Explorer (not a big surprise) and a close second was with Opera, where text overprinted other text and some parts of certain pages were cut off. The best performance I had was with Google Chrome, which GMX doesn’t actually support. I learned this when I attempted to access GMX’s calendar feature (called “Organizer”) and was confronted with the virtual version of a brick wall, upon which was written a message urging me to try another browser.

Many times while attempting to do something as simple as check my inbox for new messages (or anything really), an error message (sometimes in German) would pop up on the screen and the interface would effectively crash. Clicking on the “compose mail” button was a gamble in IE and Opera; sometimes it would bring up the ability to compose an email while other times it would pull up an error message and make me log out and back in before restoring the function. Files I tried to upload to the File Storage area would sometimes error out or the upload window would simply freeze. GMX even stalled a few times while I was trying to log out of it.

Since GMX uses AJAX, the ability to right-click in the email content area is disabled. This means you can’t right-click on images in an email to save them, you can’t right-click on links to specify how you would like to open them, and you can’t select and then copy/paste text using the right-click menu.

GMX offers no message encryption, no upload progress bar, no message labels, no remote image-display preference based on the sender, a maximum of 50MB for email attachments, no social network integration, no support for Safari or Chrome, limited support for Opera, the address book import function errors like crazy, and no keyboard shortcuts.

Lastly, upon encountering the first few of the above-mentioned issues, I sought help from GMX’s support forum. After a few minutes I began to understand that posting problems in the GMX support forum was the equivalent of shouting into a vacuum. Most posts went unanswered and what few answers I found were unhelpful (wait for an update, use a different browser, etc.)

I managed to track down the support email address (support@gmx.com) and sent them a message detailing the crashing issues, the buggy features, and asking about the lack of support for Google Chrome. I heard nothing back for a day. I sent the message again, just in case, and, as of the writing of this article, I have not received a response. On GMX’s Facebook comments, some users have indicated that they’ve been waiting several weeks for a reply to issues ranging from intermittent crashing problems to being completely locked out of their email accounts.

Worth The Problems?

Stick to your current provider instead of making the switch to this free, yet buggy and ill-supported email service provider. While GMX has a few features worth mentioning, these are not worth the frustration and lack of stability. I can almost guarantee that you’re better off keeping the email service provider you’ve got right now.

Related article: Interview with Eva Heil, Managing Director of GMX