After recent announcements from Google about GMail a small fry company in the web email business announced that they are offering 1Gb email to all current and new subscribers.
The company in question is Spymac for your free membership you get:
1Gb Email space
250Mb photo hosting
100Mb web space
Blog and Forums
WebDAV access to all your files
FTP Access to all your files
iCal hosting
You can read more about it here. Thanks for BoingBoing for the mention of this. I will try it out soon!
UPDATE: I tried it out, read the extended entry for my experience.
I tested this service tonight and I must say it is rather dismal. They will have to get their act together in a major way if they wish to compete in the real world with this.
Registration was a bit of a joke, I filled in my desired username, password and email address which took me to the next stage of the sign up process which is a voluntary personal information gathering page. At this point I had to run off to a meeting and closed my browser when I came back.
Got home, figured I will just go and re-register. Not that simple, now my desired username is in use, I tried to log in with my password but it tells me they have no personal data on record for me so I cannot use the site. My account functioned to the point that I could ask it to mail my password for me etc. I sent their support people a mail asking for help we will see how that works.
I was rather keen to test out this system so I just created a new account paying attention not to close the browser and to follow through with the registration. This was all fine and worked fine.
Once the account was activated – which requires you to supply a valid email address something that I am guessing a large portion of the world hotmail/yahoo users don’t have – I could log into my email account and mail sent to it got there immediately.
This is where the fun really starts, I opened the test mail I sent, tried to delete it using Firiefox, but nothing happened, no joy at all deleting the email.
I clicked around a bit on the site and wanted to go back to my email to try and figure out what is up with deleting email, so I hit the email icon only to be greeted by this:
The error message follows: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘../member.phpNULLmemberid=23282’>profds@spymac.com” at line 2 Query: select Account from UserSession where Account=’profds@spymac.com’
Now I can only assume that it is thinking my account is ‘profds@spymac.com’ – it is not, maybe they have some sessioning issue where I somehow picked up on someone else’s session, or maybe my interpretation is just wrong. I had to log out and log back in to make my email work.
The interface is just weird, you click on the mail icon which prompts you to sign in, once signed in it does not take you to your email instead it takes you to the front page!? You have to click on email icon yet again to get into the email. Error messages are the ugliest one-liner web pages ever, I would hate to see a computer illiterate person trying to use this!
This time I logged in with Internet Explorer and could manage to delete the email in question, so their site does not work with Firefox, that’s useful.
Again I went through the notions of clicking on a gallery – this time of a user called ‘reddy’ – and then clicking on my email icon and got the following:
The error message follows: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘../member.phpNULLmemberid=48505’>reddy@spymac.com” at line 2 Query: select Account from UserSession where Account=’reddy@spymac.com’
So definitely it is confusing itself thinking when I click on the email icon that I am trying to log in as the user whose album I am looking at! This time I just used the back button to navigate to my own email page where I could then continue working. I wonder what would happen if I was clicking on a gallery of someone that was logged in with a valid session in the database at the time? I did not try and find out.
So giving up on the email system I then tried to figure out their blogging and file storage module. I tried the “help” button, nothing happened. I clicked all over, no obvious ways to log into my blog, I guessed a URL based on other URLs to other peoples blogs, this got me nothing more than a MySQL error message.
After some further clicking on things – this time trying to make the gallery work – I came to the point where without providing name, address, education, salary etc I could not continue.
At this point I gave up on it.
