"Feelgood E-mail" - introduction to e-mail with a concience.
The number of free e-mail accounts available these days is actually quite something and, as their standard grows increasingly high, increasingly we are abandoning Outlook and other mail managers for the convenience of web mail. (Here is one reviewer’s take on his Top Ten Free E-mail Accounts).
What e-mail provider do you use? Are you still using Hotmail because everyone knows your address and you don't want the hassle of changing? Are you sitting comfy on 2Gig of Gmail, another scalp to the Google Empire? Or maybe Yahoo Beta! and its slick functions got the better of you....after all, tabs really do make life great don't they! Perhaps you are a Mac user, and you know Yahoo Beta! is not better for everybody? Perhaps even, you are one of those people, who have one of those other free e-mail accounts, of which there are so many - but of which most of us never heard.
Not so long ago I came across and signed up with an e-mail provider I never heard of before: Ippimail. A piece of paper was shoved into my hands outside Warren Street Underground. I am accustomed to shove pieces of paper shoved into my hands right back where they came from...but I followed this one up. Ippimail is an e-mail account with a difference, two important differences in fact. Difference number one: while Ippimail, like other free e-mail accounts, makes its money from advertising, unlike your average free e-mail account - the likes of yahoo and hotmail etc. - Ippimail gives 45% of profits to charity. Difference number two: (the significance of this not to be underestimated) another 10% of profits go to the open-source (OS) community who are responsible for the creation and continued development of this e-mail service (See Wikipedia for: Open Source Software).
All of this goes to make Ippimail a pretty hip e-mail account to be using! When I came across Ippimail I was impressed by how simple and nice an idea it was and I soon opened myself an account (about five minutes work). It turns out, upon further investigation, that an e-mail service which raises money for good causes is no new idea and that there are in fact a number of such services out there. Among these for example the US based Charity Mail and Care2 E-mail. Charity Mail contracts management of their site out to Everyone.net who take 50% of advertising profits, what's left going to charity. Care2 E-mail offers a variety of services including e-mail and has been going since 1998. I give more detailed reviews below, but while it is nice to see that Ippimail is not alone in trying to harness the power of e-mail for good causes, neither of these accounts seems to have much to recommend it over Ippimail.
Ippimail
Ippimail has a user friendly, but original, clean interface. At 200 Meg (and rising) it beats a number of other available and similar accounts for storage. It is a UK based service. It is straight forward, no hassle, easy to use. Ippimail encourage their users to fill out a detailed but anonymous personal profile to allow targeted advertising and thus maximise revenue from advertising. While Ippimail makes its money from advertising, this is no more intrusive than is that of Yahoo or Hotmail, and while Yahoo and Hotmail are groaning under the weight of SPAM, Ippimail is, as yet, spam free. Other advantages include greater choice of address than you will get with any of the more established providers. That Ippimail is a good account is important to persuading people to use it, but the point of Ippimail is that it is more than just another e-mail account. Contributing towards good causes it is an account with a conscience, but more than this Ippimail stands out for its commitment to OS software. Ippimail is a showcase for OS work with the potential to really raise awareness of this movement and as the standard of Ippimail goes up and up, to help establish a credibility it does not have at present. Most of the people I have introduced to Ippimail did not know what OS was, they do now, and some take as much of an interest in this as in the charity idea. As an open source project Ippimail is something for us all to get involved in. Not being much of a programmer myself there is not much I can do for the technical side of things, but I hope to distinguish Ippimail as soon as possible with its very own Japanese version and am very pleased to be part of the team in this way. What about you? How about you get involved? Sign up. Tell your friends - join the Ippimail community! The cool thing about Ippimail, is that it is also a perfectly respectable e-mail address and account.
Care2 E-mail
Care2 E-mail has been around since 1998. At 100Meg storage and 10Meg attachment capacity it comes in substantially under Ippimail’s 200Meg storage. It has address import, a 12 language spell check, and much besides. If you can take the rainforest in your mail interface and the cute characters which infest it, this is otherwise a fairly professional and user friendly account. From my own experience of signing up to one of their accounts I found them to be encouraging a lot of participation giving one the feeling of signing up to more than an e-mail account. Care2 E-mail actually seems to work to bring their users and their sponsors together and to bring issues of concern to their charities and NGOs to the attention of users and visa versa. It is something of a network. If you are up for that sort of thing great, this account might actually be worth a try. If you desire funny e-mail addresses like vegiemail and snailmail, once again this may be the account for you. A lot of people however, are unlikely I suspect, to have patience with such an account. To harness this majority to good causes, Ippimail may be the answer as it is good for peoples coconscience without asking very much of them!
Charity Mail as I mentioned above contract management of their site out to Everyone.net who take 50% of advertising profits. The interface is a bit messy, but the functions are there, including word processing tools yahoo style (complete with smileys). They offer three different accounts, only one of which is completely free. This free account with a miserly 25Meg storage, offers a pretty inferior service, while for $2.08 a month you can get a service approaching Ippimail standard while for $4.50 you will get 1,000Meg. But then who would pay for that sort of memory when you can get 5Gig for free with other providers? Not wishing of course to disparage it since I support all these projects, Charity Mail is somehow clinical, rather than being the centre of a community.
