I guess everybody has seen the ’’doing bhangra’’ advertisement of rediff mail. I think the guy ’’waiting to download’’ his mail was using ePatra.com. I tried epatra.com. It was so slow I was instantly reminded of the advertisement. While rediff and yahoo are going about giving 5 and 6 MB of free space, ePatra is still stuck at 3MB. The worst part is that ePatra like hotmail is basically and e-mail portal. The time (rather ages) taken by the portal’s first page to load and subsequent snail-paced downloading of mails, defeats the very idea of it being an e-mail based portal. The only advantage ePatra has, is its multilingual support. That too is almost rendered a non-advantage, since rediff has started ’’Hindi mail’’. And as everybody knows, rediff is lightening-fast.
Anybody wanting to sign-up with ePatra should remember that unless they shape up, they will be packing up very soon. So the e-mail ID assigend to him/her will become useless resulting in a lot of inconvenience.