Lets make a list!

[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by communicant

As Tsunami recently pointed out in another thread, free accounts are available at inmail.cz, a service that is also available as .sk, .pl, .hu.

InMail is a Slowak service I believe, even though they expanded to other neighbouring countries. Since the opening post asked for a list of emails hosted per country, I didn't dare to include InMail in the Czech list. I may be wrongly informed, but I believe their servers are in Slowakia.

Originally Posted by drew

Tsunami maybe we are not as North Korea but we
are very much like former German Democratic Republic
in that we are very keen on keeping a formal norm for all to conform to

Come to Belgium for a visit and observe what conservativism and conformity are like in present day western Europe. I can only hope Sweden is more progressive, from my experience with (admitted, expatriated) Swedes you guys seem to be a much more liberal thinking nation than us. Brussels being one somewhat openminded enclave, the Belgian countryside is not to be recommended at all. (well, maybe I am somewhat biased as I dress rather eccentric by choice and love to discuss without any taboo, but the acceptance of that is one of the core points in determining if a place is openminded or not. I can only say I am not proud of my native country at all)



I lived in Berlin. The former DDR was adhering to norms and conformism to the outside world, but the underground scene was very non-conformist and deliberately ignored all norms the outside world saw. This was also one of the reasons why the DDR government was amongst the countries that had it hardest to really monitor and control its citizens in that era. Some remainders of DDR rebellion even continue to operate today, such as the band "Herbst in Peking" or the 1.FC Union Berlin football team which previously was seen as an icon of rebellion. Berlin is a great place, full of history but at the same time way ahead of most other capitals at the same time. Berlin knows no rules or norms, you do as you wish and can spread your wings to fullest extent.




As for the webmail.co.za : has this service been a stable enough one that is likely to survive for the forseeable future?

I would have some concerns about Gmail.co.za since you never know what happens if there would ever be a naming dispute. Often the users of a service are severely hindered by that too.

Africa has some great ccTLD's which sadly enough are hardly used. For example .mu and .cd would be excellent for music related sites (and email) but .mu is limitedly used due to high registration costs, and .cd somehow doesn't seem to live up to its potential. I am unaware if .dj (which has so far been most active trying to label itself as a "music domain") has reached some considerable success or not.

[bbauri]

Originally Posted by Tsunami

Nice topic


I am from Belgium. We have here (restricting to only serious services and non-ISP related)

mail.be
contactoffice.com (offices in different countries but the head office is in Brussels)

Other Belgian email services you will often see are ISP-bound. Then there's a few silly ones who will likely not last very long. The above two however have been around for several years and have a great reputation. I remember a friend who was at university where the teacher recommended his students to use mail.be

In Czech Republic, the following local free mail services not attached to an ISP and with servers inside Czech Republic, were very widely used (even more than Gmail and Hotmail) when I was there:

seznam.cz (they have multiple domains, most use seznam.cz, post.cz or email.cz but they're all part of Seznam company. They also owned stream.cz, mainly a video posting website but the domain was available for email too)
Centrum.cz
Atlas.cz (but this one seemed to be less popular than the other two)

Hi, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions.
1. Are not mail.be and contactoffice the same email service? Also, centrum and atlas are same or not?
2. Mail.be free account seems too restricted e.g 100 mb space, 100 contacts, 5mb attachment etc. Can you tell me if they provide pop/imap for free account? I couldn't find much info on their webpage.

[bbauri]

Since we were talking about South Africa, here are another couple of ESPs from South Africa...
1. Ananzimail.co.za
2. Coolmail.biz

[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by bbauri

Hi, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions.
1. Are not mail.be and contactoffice the same email service? Also, centrum and atlas are same or not?
2. Mail.be free account seems too restricted e.g 100 mb space, 100 contacts, 5mb attachment etc. Can you tell me if they provide pop/imap for free account? I couldn't find much info on their webpage.

Not sure if Atlas and Centrum are from the same provider. I only spent some months in the country so I don't dare to make statements about the Czech cyber world.

Mail.be and ContactOffice are products of the same company indeed, based in Brussels.

The overview of their formulas are here, the language can be changed using the flags on the right at the homepage Based on the Dutch version of the page it seems IMAP and POP are privileges reserved for paying customers. That said, available for every type of paid account, so also the cheapest of the different paid packages. Only free users don't seem to get POP and IMAP.

Free version indeed restricts the number of contacts, favourites, etc while the number allowed goes up very drastically the moment you pay.

I think personally ContactOffice has a better free package than Mail.be although I am not sure about the inactivity limit.

To my knowledge the company tries to lurk people into giving the free version a try, at some point you could only sign up for the free version and then could upgrade if you liked it. They do like people trying their service for free and seem to be pretty confident about the number of people who will then switch to paid accounts.

Mail.be and ContactOffice are two products from the same Brussels based company, but the rules of the email part somehow are slightly different. Not sure why they didn't apply universal rules to all their products, but indeed ContactOffice has a slightly different package than Mail.be, so it depends on which of both pages you sign up.