On another note, Webmail.us is well known for stealing ideas from other more established providers (e.g. BlueTie, Mail2world and Everyone.net) and projects (e.g. Roundcube). They just copycat features and designs because they lack creative thinking, originality and imagination!!

My recommendation is to use GMail Hosted Mail.

AOL will be throwing their hat into the free email hosting ring soon as well. This means that all the big boys out there (Google, AOL, MSN) will be providing FREE email hosting for your domain.

The average small business owner, in my experienced opinion, doesn’t give as much thought as he or she should when considering email services for their website’s domain. Now present them with the option of the 3 giants - Google (Gmail), AOL, and MSN (Hotmail/Live Mail) all of which are free - versus paying for email hosting with Webmail.us…Not a pretty picture for Webmail.us.

My mother always proclaimed, “I don’t believe in free.” I get that; everything comes with a price, in one form or another. On the surface, one may conclude that a few banner ads taking up precious browser space may be the price to pay for hosting their email with AOL or Hotmail. But, there is so much more to consider. So, I recommend looking beyond dollars, and consider the *sense*.

As for my current conclusions, I think Hotmail (and maybe AOL) is a great solution for your club or group. Gmail is, in my opinion, ideal for small businesses out of the 3 giants (AOL, Hotmail, & Google), and a worthy contender for Webmail.us.

But, don’t completely dismiss Webmail.us. I haven’t. This is a great company with true leadership and vision. All they do is email. Plus, if you have a problem, they have a number you can call. None of the big boys have that kind of support…Now that’s something to really consider.

Bottom line: We as consumers have many options now when it comes to email hosting, and the players involved are all competing for our business. It doesn’t get any better than that.

All the two and three letter combinations in .com/.net/.org were registered many years ago and they rarely appear for registration. Also, the .org registry has decided to stop registration of new 2 letter domains which means 2 letter .org domains expire but cannot be re-registered. The .biz and .info registries only permit three letter domains and above. The .uk registry allows 2 letter combainations provided one is a number, but all of these were registered years ago.

You can register two letter domain names. How about ny.com, aa.com, aw.com? aj.com? bk.com? bp.com?

Or better how about one letter domain names? z.com (I love the 350!WOW!), x.com (PayPal.com)

From the website…

# Shared calendar
# Web document authoring and sharing
# “Over the air” sync to mobile devices
# VoIP integration
# Microsoft Outlook, Apple, and Linux compatibility

second I agree. I wouldn’t switch away from gmail which offers basically the exact same things for free and is 10 times faster. With gmail you can recieve POP mail and you can also set up different accounts to send the mail from.

Sure webmail.us has a pretty cool, albeit clunky, ajax interface, but if you’re going to pay for email, even something like fastmail.fm is a much better price and probably 50 times faster, with even more features.

It really is sad to see TC hawking this subpar product. I’d like to know what the ties are? Like I said before, they have TC listed in their RSS feeds on the demo. Is that what it takes to get on TC now?

And just for the record I have no 2.0 web app that I am hawking but I would like to be able to rely on TC to provide me with quality info on cutting edge products. This definitely is not one of them.

And in response to what somebody said earlier about the NYT doing it. Well, that’s why most of us come here instead of the NYT because we expect TC not to do it.

…

SSL is used and clearly available at https://secure.webmail.us .
Most common IMAP and POP client also support TLS/SSL as do Webmail’s servers.

http://www.essentialsecurity.c.....icle17.htm

For $60 seems pretty expensive for a product that doesn’t provide all necessary features i.e. encryption, authentication, etc….You’d think that with all the problems businesses, and especially our own gov, have been facing today with internet security issues, that products would update their product in response to recent trends….

I come back here because it’s hard to get rid of bad habits. That’s why I also continue to visit GigaOM.

Would you rather leave hosted email up to M$, Google and Yahoo!? Quit your bitchin’ and take it for what it is — an overview of a solid email hosting platform for businesses. It’s not in Private Beta or Alpha, or “stealth mode.” It’s a real-deal scaled web app. Isn’t that the focus of TechCrunch?

I don’t blame Michael Arrington for trying to expand the business, I would probably do the same, where I in his shoes, but his co-editor(s?) just don’t live up to Michael. Marshal isn’t bad by most standards, but also no better than what you can find everywhere else in the blogosphere, thereby removing the incentive to return to techcrunch on a regular basis.

Sorry Marshall, if you consider this flaming…

I resemble that remark.

http://www.searchles.com
http://www.dumbfind.com

sincerely,

dumbfounder