As now the war of free email service providers hots up, we are ought to see more attractions for the consumers. But what bothers me is that whether it is fulfilling its basic functionality or not. Is it simple to use and fast enough to send the mails through or not. Unfortunately in both these parameters rediffmail service has been disappointing.
Often they fill their home page with very bulky flash advertisements. These ads create a lot of problem for the home users as they take terribly long to load and display properly. This advertisement blocks the viewing of the rediff homepage and the prompt to enter the user id and password for viewing the mails. Rediff.com has made a complete U turn with their basic designing approach. While Rediff.com started with having the distinction of being one of the few sites that used to load without hassle on dial up connections.
It was very convenient and fast to check the mails through a separate page for mails. But now there is only one page through which you can go to inbox. But this is now clogged with the lot of stuff that does not permit it to load properly. There is an annoying pop up ad and personalized content to make the matters worse.
These redundant news excerpts are shown with any body asking for them. These are not in accordance with personalized content selected on the homepage. Actually rediff.com stores the information about users? preferences in a cookie on the local machine instead of associating it with the user id. So the preferences are there as long as the cookie is found, if you change the machine or delete the cookie then user is required to do the painful & lengthy process of marking the preferences again.
All in all to me service appears to have lost drastically on the basics there by making it very difficult to use for home users. The facilities recently added also demand you give a lot of internet time. For example it is debatable howlong will a 1GB inbox take to load? Moreover it is not possible for home users to upload a 1 MB file to the email message, so the question of uploading and attaching 10 MB files does not even arise. It is good for mainly corporate users who have dedicated broadband connections.