SPYMAC.com offers 1GB free E-mail

ALTHOUGH MANY articles have been written about Google's upcoming "GMail" service, that will offer users 1GB of free email space with a webmail interface, very few people have actually used it. The service continues to be in a "closed beta" stage, or as the company calls it "a limited test period".

When we INQuired, I was told to wait until further notice, as it's "only available to a small number of people who are helping to test and improve the service before it is made more widely available".

This has not prevented a select few who are testing the service from posting screenshots of the experimental GMail web interface. Find two screenshots HERE and HERE.

Folks at Macintosh advocacy site SPYMAC.com seem to have decided to join the "free mail storage war" to counter Google's GMail, and like Lycos, they are now offering 1GB of storage for all their free e-mail accounts, which can be accessed via POP3 or through a webmail interface.

Sadly the webmail screens seems to be optimized for 1024x768 or higher resolutions, which will be annoying for those still running their systems at lower resolutions. See my screenshots of the Inbox and Compose web pages.

While you get 1GB of storage, Google would say that many of these alternatives lack all the promised (or should I say hyped?) revolutionary search and "message threading" features that gmail will supposedly offer to everyone "real soon now".

The SPYMAC.com service has worked very well for me. So if you are looking for a Gmail alternative and don't mind having a @spymac.com in your e-mail address, give it a try. µ