GMX anyone?

[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by Shelded

I still can use the web interface in german. If I try to log in at gmx.net I am presented a german interface and I succeed. If I try to log in at gmx.com I get english and cannot log in. I'm in the USA (my profile shows my home address in "Deutschland" ). I have used their system in the past to change my aliases but can't figure if they still allow that. So I have a couple gmx.net and have abandoned the original gmx.co.uk alias.
(Yup, I was wrong above where I said I was using gmx.com -- it's gmx.net.)

Yet it's pretty evident the gmx.com is somehow related to the gmx.net people. There's a wikipedia entry which tries to explain this.

Wikipedia is not always reliable. GMX.de has a good reputation in Germany for sure. In a way it's odd they don't use similar systems for the .com variant.

I speak German fluently so would not have issues with the interface ; the issue is that signing up would require lying about my address (or using the old address when I indeed did live in Germany ; but that was almost 3 years ago) and I don't like the idea of that. The moment the lie is revealed, the mailbox may be shut down.

Web.de is another German service that has a good reputation but requires to be signed up for from a German-speaking country.

[drew]

Shelded I am not criticizing you at all but due to some weird circumstances in my body I don't feel good about this: quote I'm in the USA (my profile shows my home address in "Deutschland" /quote

I did that in yahoo pretending me to live in England on yahoo.co.uk and in Canada on yahoo.ca and in India using yahoo.in and in Australia on y7mail.com and that way I got "free" pop going in all of them?

Now I only have yahoo.se and ymail,com that do have free pop. I felt bad about pretending but to each their own. No offence intended.

I do have a gmx.com account though. But never use it.

[Shelded]

Don't worry, I am not defending it. I simply stated a fact of what I found in my GMX.net profile. I don't know what put it there. Honestly, it's been 10 years. I imagine I put it there, but what was their precise request wording? "you must give us a german address below" would not mean "you must live in germany"

I have always had the realization that they may someday decide I am undesirable and remove my account, but that is not apparently important to them, either.

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by Shelded

I have always had the realization that they may someday decide I am undesirable and remove my account, but that is not apparently important to them, either.

Speaking of precise wording, I can't recall that as regards their decision to restrict signups to certain countries, but I do seem to recall that it seemed fairly clear at the time that they had no intention of deleting/disabling the accounts of any "outsiders" who were already registered/using the service, but would only be restricting new signups.

So if your account goes back some 10 years, there's a good chance there wasn't any need to provide a German/Austrian/Swiss address at that time and you were allowed to keep your account, having already been signed up before the restriction was established, as was the case when I signed up as well, also probably at least 10 years ago.

But regardless of exactly when you signed up in relation to when the restriction went into place, if you've had the account for that long, I would say that it's highly unlikely they'll delete/disable it on the basis of your current (actual) residence. (To make sure it's clear, I am talking about the gmx.de/gmx.net service here, which is distinct from the much newer gmx.com service, the latter of which has no such restriction.)

Regarding Drew's (somewhat off-topic) discussion of the Yahoo service (although this observation applies to gmx.net/gmx.de as well), if I felt that my misrepresenting my "region" was likely to risk putting Yahoo out of business or to cause serious harm to their service, I might "feel bad" about it. As it is, since I doubt that anything I might do with their service would be likely to have such "disastrous" effects on Yahoo or anything/anyone else, I can't say I've lost much sleep over the issue.

[Tsunami]

Slightly off-topic, but you don't need to live in for example China to get a Yahoo.com.cn email address. Changing the prefered language does the trick usually. My parents live in Belgium and got a yahoo.co.uk address instead of yahoo.com because they opted for "English (British)" as language. They were not asked a UK address at all, but changing the interface's language while signing up got them a yahoo.co.uk ... To their own surprise although they've never complained about it.

[Shelded]

Originally Posted by xmailer

As it is, since I doubt that anything I might do with their service would be likely to have such "disastrous" effects on Yahoo or anything/anyone else, I can't say I've lost much sleep over the issue.

LOL, if they would just ask me once or allow me to set a switch I would tell them there is not an ice cube's chance in he11 that I would ever be interested in clicking or even looking at yahoo's dating ads. They are wasting their money on that stuff and obviously do not mind little old me. It offends me. Similarly, Hotmail ALWAYS had something sex-oriented on their login landing pages; I don't mind if "sex sells" but when I am not buying it, why don't they show me wine, song, and fast cars, instead?

Not to ignore the elephant in the room (if you are a GMX.net user) the sex is a lot more strongly placed on the GMX site. I don't even understand where they make the money on that one. Again, it was so NSFW that I quit using the web interface and onlly use POP there. Years ago, there I was, at work, checking GMX mail at lunch, and OMG a GMX-inspired popup came up -- a really NSFW bikini. I suppose in Euope that's OK for work but I thought the corporate internet police would roast me. The GMX.com site has none of that sort of thing that I can tell (as a nonsubscriber).

[Tsunami]

Don't be offended by those ads ; they are just generic ads not orientated towards you, but towards thousands or millions of users. They will accept whatever advertiser is willing to pay, regardless of subject. While I am unsure what the abbreviation is of NSFW ; several of my colleagues use Hotmail (I don't) and I never saw anything very explicitly sexual on their screens while they were checking their webmail. I am a bit surprised by what you are typing (not saying though I don't believe you) ; maybe the specific ads shown change randomly from time to time? It's called "hot"mail for a reason of course

I use Gmail mostly (and Safe-Mail and Fastmail to lesser extent ; better interfaces and such but smaller inbox ) and while Gmail does have dating ads, they are text-only and thus totally harmless no matter from what computer I would choose to sign in.

[xmailer]

NSFW means "Not safe for work", I think.

As for their accepting advertising from anyone willing to pay, I've certainly gotten the same general impression about Google/Gmail, who I doubt care one whit about the honesty or ethics of those able to pay to advertise with them, although of course the big difference is, as you say, that at least Gmail doesn't have obnoxious graphical ads as most of the other free services do (whether or not apparently "sexually oriented" in nature), since of course they don't have any graphical ads at all.

As for gmx.com, although I make no real use of the service, and only rarely login to their web interface, at least as of the last time I did, they didn't have "obnoxious" graphical ads since they have never had any ads at all in their interface as far as I know. Which might make one wonder what their motive for running that service is, since I'm not sure how it might generate any revenue for them. But since they apparently don't get any advertising revenue, nor derive any direct revenue for the service from its users, that may well help explain why the web interface has always seemed to me so generally unappealing in most respects, despite the lack of advertising. That is, that there's always some price for "free."

[Shelded]

NSFW = not safe for work. GIYF if you didn't know that

I reviewed the current Microsoft sites, I don't have a Hotmail/MSN account anymore so I could not look. I can't document what I was saying. They may have changed, but the MSN sites always had sure to have some "sexy" things on the landing page -- not just meaning the ads, but the headlines, the image content. It just always appealed to the baser senses.

Still, MSN seemed far ahead of Yahoo, whose email and news sites did the same only a bit worse.

But GMX.net, it's hard to imagine xmailer doesn't remember that. They had a section called erotik and gave sex tips. You really could use the email without seeing that, but if you investigated the entirety of the site you had to come across it. I always figured that American culture is different than European, but I considered the stuff soft porn. I didn't feel I could recommend the mail service to someone without presenting the disclaimer. So, I guess GMX.com may be a good thing after all

[Tsunami]

As said, with Gmail you're safe because their ads are text-only.

As for "Erotik" and sex tips (are you sure of the latter? Lot of European online papers or general sites have an erotic section but most of it is nothing more than some sensual pictures, topless being the maximum ... never any hardcore thing) : I can think of several European services, email or other, even , who have a "Babe of the Week" or articles about sexuality. The pictures will be mainly suggestive instead of explicit, so I would be surprised (especially because these are a minority of the sites where many other articles are about sports, arts, politics, travel, ... anything) if anyone would complain about it. Especially because, as said, these articles are only a small portion of a whole package where the majority of content will be about totally different subjects.

And on none of those sites that have such a section, I've seen an email or chat service that cannot be accessed without going through the less innocent portions of the site first. Usually you can navigate straight into the email portion.

That said, spam with unpleasant titles (gambling, drugs, etc) was one of the reasons why I gave up Hotmail many years ago. I deleted any such mail without even opening it, even reported it as spam. But when I noticed that didn't help a bit and new spam mails came in in high frequency, I got tired of deleting 20 mails a day and just gave up Hotmail. With Gmail, I rarely if ever get any spam.

[Shelded]

Originally Posted by Tsunami

As for "Erotik" and sex tips[...] ... never any hardcore thing)[...]The pictures will be mainly suggestive instead of explicit,[...]these articles are only a small portion of a whole [...]
[...] Usually you can navigate straight into the email portion.

You basically describe what I was saying, I said it was soft core. Yes, the articles are common on some sites but atypical to encounter on American email sites such as Yahoo or Windows Live.

That said, spam with unpleasant titles (gambling, drugs, etc) was one of the reasons why I gave up Hotmail many years ago. I deleted any such mail without even opening it, even reported it as spam. But when I noticed that didn't help a bit and new spam mails came in in high frequency, I got tired of deleting 20 mails a day and just gave up Hotmail. With Gmail, I rarely if ever get any spam.

I don't fault a mail provider for the type of spam I get, but I do fault them for not providing a spam management tool. I also had terrible experience with Hotmail and dropped them like a hot potato. Funny, I don't think I have EVER gotten a spam at GMX. I hadn't thought about it. With a record like that, they potentially toss good email I suppose, but I intend to get very little real email there so I don't mind. But certainly they must have some spam coming in for me after 10 years.

[Tsunami]

I've seen some girls in revealing poses on the MSN news site ; I think they have different news sites per language or per country they operate in.

Also, a girl in a bikini or so, or even topless, I would never consider this softcore. But maybe this is indeed the difference between Europe and America. But the moments when such picture came up on a work computer here, people generally mocked with it rather than being offended in any way. It would be different if you'd browse for it voluntarely, but a news site having one or two such articles or photos is a different thing. I don't think many email sites that have such articles would not have a URL to navigate straight to the email signin page.

[communicant]

Originally Posted by iPhone User

If you do get a GMX account, it will eventually be blocked for no reason. It has happened to thousands upon thousands of users. Just read the comments on their Facebook page. It says it all. It's not worth bothering with.

I thought I remembered this thread from 2011, so I'm posting here rather than starting a new one. I recently discovered that my GMX account has 'expired' for no reason, despite the fact that I definitely did log in to it less than six months ago. I didn't violate the TOS in any way, and I didn't exceed the inactivity period. Why on earth do they do this? I wrote to corporate support about it. Has anyone ever succeeded in getting a GMX account reactivated after one of these arbitrary deletions?

[communicant]

Update since I made the above post:

I have received a snippy reply from GMX support which would be somewhat surprising even if it came from the owner of a one-man service who was having a bad day, but which is truly surprising coming from a huge corporate support department.

It refers to my ticket as an "accusation" and haughtily informs me that the account is not blocked at all. It blames any problem on password "issues" and says they have checked to see if the account has been hacked and decided it had not been hacked, because there had been no attempt to change the password.

It then refers self-righteously to their "two million satisfied customers and counting" and goes on to say that "Those [who are] blocked deserved to be blocked for the safety of those who don't spam - there is always a good reason behind our blocking; of course even spammer would hate us for blocking their spamming addresses and write crap online. Per day we catch more than 1,000 spammers with the help of third party companies dedicated to this alone."

I doubt very much that all the online complaints in respectable forums about wrongly blocked GMX accounts can be dismissed as "crap," which is an oddly unprofessional word for them to have used. Anyway, do spammers really go on line in discussion forums and complain about blocked accounts? And what are those "third party companies" whose sole job is to "help" GMX catch spammers? More and more curious!

As for my own situation, after receiving the snippy reply from support I went back and was able to log in to the account, but I know for certain that it was simply non-existent when I tried to log in before. More to the point, at no time did any error message indicate that the multiple failed logins were caused by an incorrect password. Also, the URL that flashed by when I tried to log on definitely contained the word "expired" somewhere in it.

All in all, a very odd performance by GMX, is it not? My account is now available again, but I don't feel very confident about using it.

Do others here have experience with GMX deleting accounts arbitrarily? And what is one to make of that very odd reply from GMX corporate support, which manages to be defensive and condescending at the same time?

[communicant]

Maybe it's because I tacked two posts onto the end of an old thread, but I'm a little surprised that nobody has responded to the above query regarding a recent experience with GMX. I hope the mods will not object if I 'bump' the request for comments.