Although it's at least as sluggish as ever, after two days of being unable to login to the webmail for either of my GMX accounts, I'm finally able to login to both of them again, but with a 'renewed distrust' of the GMX service.
I first attempted to post a report of the problem to their forums, but quickly recalled that in order to post I had to login to the forum, and the
only way to do so, AFAIK, is by logging into one's gmx webmail first, and following a link in the webmail interface. While that seems to me a less than ideal way to handle it, it occurred to me that it may make perfect sense from their point of view in that by preventing those who can't login from posting the problem openly in the forum, it keeps the rest of their users from realizing just how prevalent the web login problems may be.
But on scouring the forum, I did find a thread set up for those having such problems to post "anonymously" (i.e., without logging in with an account name). The "catch" is that posts to that thread are moderated, and I noticed that, although the thread was some eight pages long with login problem reports, not a single new post had been added since the end of last month. So
either no one besides myself has had any problems logging into the web interface this month, or they're a bit behind in moderating and adding new posts. My own post has yet to appear in the thread, close to two days after I submitted it. So I suppose one can only conjecture as to whether they're simply too understaffed to keep up with moderating these posts, or too overwhelmed by the sheer number of them, and/or just prefer
not to reveal to the users at large just how many users are having login problems.
In any case, I noticed that the GMX staff's reply to most of those posting with login problems in the past was to write to their support address with their account "details" (without specifying
what details they needed -- do they need the password as well as the account user name or,,,?). Which makes me wonder why they even bothered setting up the thread for posting these problems publicly, if they prefer to handle it by email. Although I have yet to receive a reply to my post, had they given me their stock reply to email them with my "account details", I had considering responding sarcastically by telling them that I would indeed do so, as soon as I'm able to find a reliable enough email service to email them
from -- which unfortunately isn't all that far from the truth, as email services, and email in general, seem to me to be becoming less and less reliable with every passing day.
However, as I said above, I did finally manage to login again today. And as I'm able to do so with both accounts, neither of which was I able to until now, it doesn't seem likely that it had anything to do with their fixing anything as a result of my (thus far unposted) post to their forum, as I had only bothered reporting the problem with one of my accounts, figuring I'd report the problem with the other later, if necessary. And since I don't think I've made any relevant changes to my system's settings over the past couple days, I still don't think it had anything to do with any changes at my end. Nor do I think it's likely that they've fixed anything in the past two days, either with their system or with my accounts.
But the best I'm able to conjecture, it seems to me that something most likely changed with their login pages/urls. Specifically, up until now, I've had no problem logging in (except for the usual slowness, that is) by going to
http://gmx.com and filling in the login info on that page. But today, more or less by "accident" (by following a link in another user's post in their forum), I ended up going to
http://www.gmx.com instead, and although that page
looked identical to the one I always arrived at when going to the address
without the 'www', I noticed that the 'www' address had
redirected me to
http://mail-us.gmx.com/ -- from which I was able to log in to both of my accounts as usual.
So the best I can tell, it appears to me that although both pages
look the same, at least for myself, and for whatever reason,
only the page at the latter link works properly to allow me to login to my account. I don't know what exactly might have changed to make this the case, but as I can only think that it must have been
something they changed at their end, it would have been nice if they'd bothered clearly informing their users of this change. Unless, of course, it was simply a matter of incompetence on their part in not even realizing that anything had been changed or not realizing that it might affect at least some of their users' ability to access their accounts in the way they're accustomed to.
Either way, this experience hasn't exactly enhanced my impression of the service and I'll probably be more reluctant to make any "serious" use of it until it's had quite a bit longer to establish itself as a more stable service.