Rediff is one of the most trusted brand on net as far as india is concerned. like most of the indian surfers my day also starts with rediff.com. its news coverage is exceptionally good (and fast). I check up rediff at least 25 times day to get the latest news. earlier it was similar with their mail service.
i guess among all the mail services popular in india, rediffmail will come just after hotmail and yahoo, in terms of popularity.but service-wise it is definitely much above hotmail (or should it be ’was’). till some time back it was the most reliable and really lightning fast - no comparison on that count. and beleive me, i’m using rediffmail since long.
however since last couple of months things are different and going downhill. offlate it takes lots of time to open. many a time while accessing specific mails, it hangs in between. even more often it does not allow mails to be deleted. in short it has become quite unreliable. one thing that I have observed is that it happens more in the morning . may be because everyone wants to access it the first thing in the morning and the system gets excessive loads. may be its popularity has become a problem.
i had also tried using its vernacular language mails couple of times. however in not a single case it was proper. whenever I have rcvd vernacular mails it was invariably illegible.
one last thing before I end. I had written mails to them informing them about the problems. in return they had asked me so many technical questions that I stopped persuing it further.