Rediffmail was one of the first Indian email (if not the first )companies that came up on the Web.
It has continued to remain free despite of all the turbulences of recent times. This is a sure sign that it does not wish to go commercial any soon.So having an account there is a good bet one can take.
Using rediffmail is really a breeze , exactly like they used to show in the ads. Its really blazing fast! The space provided by rediff is 10 MB (when I signed up), which is a large amount.
The layout in rediff has been through a slow metamorphosis. It has been laid out in such a way that even a newbie wouldn’t find trouble navigating it. The latest crystal like layout is a real treat to the eyes.
Other big advantages include
--> POP Access to your mail (new feature) so that you can download the mails for offline viewing.(using Outlook, Eudora)
--> Receiving messages on your mobile , albeit at a cost
--> An effective spam control mechanism
--> An attachment size can be upto 5MB.This is really huge considering Yahoo! offers 2MB and Hotmail 1MB , I think.
--> And more than all, its SWADESHI ! :-)
The address book is also pretty good. All other features provided by the other free mail service providers exist and are all these features are good.
The aberrations include-
Typing rediffmail.com takes you to rediff.com, the parent site. This is taking undue advantage of the customer base of its mail service to pull the hit rate of its parent company. This is a bit like Microsoft.
There is no previous history of the account u surfed saved on the computer(using cookies) , even if u wanted. This makes it a pain to login to the account each time though you are using the computer at our home, where security is not a issue.
Yahoo and Hotmail have options where you can save password, so that next time you login you are taken directly to the inbox. Even though there is a time-out (expiry) for the cookie in such services, it is a real good feature that is lacking in ReDIFF.
If you discard all such minor aberrations, it is worth having an account with rediff and even more so because it has free POP3 access.
PS : I have not used the multilingual feature of Rediff. So , am not in a position to explain Anybody used it??