What is “Mail.com”
Last fall, I switched my email accounts to an email service hosted at the url mail.com which provides “free email” at your choice of up to about 200 possible domains that they have registered.
The email service is free, paid for by sponsored advertising. The ads take the form of simulated mail messages in your inbox (since they are not real email messages, you cannot mark them as spam). They also take the form of full screen ads when you first access your email via the web – typically its a full screen ad trying to convert you to a paid premium email account. Similarly, on the Android app, sometimes when selecting a mail message to read, you will see a full screen ad before you can access your email message. As before, these ads are often from the mail service itself trying to convert you to a paying customer. If you pay a subscription fee, the ads allegedly go away.
SEE UPDATES AT END
Our Experience
When I tried to login one day in February 2018, I received this message saying access to my account was “blocked” due to “irregular activity”:
I contacted Customer Service using their online form (the only way to reach them) and received this 24 hours later (to my alternate email address):
The service, arbitrarily, without any explanation, shut off access to my email and calendar for reasons having nothing to do with me. In fact, this shut down occurred overnight while I was a sleep. Clearly, this is not something I caused. Yet they refuse to provide any explanation.
I contacted them a third time to ask for an explanation and they sent a form response saying a “ticket” had already been opened on this issue and dealt with (see above) and, basically, further requests to them will be ignored. They actually say that “Customer Support is our main priority” which empirically is not true.
The Aftermath
I looked online for reviews of “Mail.com” and I learned two things:
1. There are many fake review web sites with titles similar to “Top Ten Best …” where every product or service is wonderful.
2. There are also many user community web sites that had many negative comments about “Mail.com”. My experience is apparently not unusual with Mail.com.
Some of the comments voiced a suspicion that Mail.com blocks accounts after several months if you have failed to convert to a paid subscription account. Since Mail.com is unreachable, it is impossible to discuss this allegation with anyone at Mail.com.
Better Business Bureau
The parent company of Mail.com is 1 & 1 Mail & Media Inc. The company, in various places, is shown with an address in Pennsylvania but may be based in Germany. It appears to be connected to 1&1 Internet, Inc as some of their IP addresses map back to 1&1 Internet.
According to the Better Business Bureau report for the Washington, DC area only, they have received 30 complaints, 1 negative review and 1 positive report. BBB assigns them an A+ (based on separate experience I have documented with BBB, BBB ratings are meaningless). The negative complaints generally involve having their credit card billed for services the user says they did not authorize and the great difficulty that paying customers have in deleting their account and getting Mail.com to stop billing them.
The company tries to have you to install various add-on software components to your Internet browser, ostensibly to give you instant notice of new mail. However, many reviewers say you should not install these components and if you do, should remove them. 82% of IE users uninstall the component within one week of installing the add on. Many “free” browser extensions are actually used to spy on your online behavior, to track your online web access, and to create marketing dossiers about your possible interests. This data is then sold to organizations wishing to target people like you, to sell you products or services. We do not know if the “free” Mail.com browser add ons perform this feature (as noted, Mail.com is unreachable and makes it impossible to ask them questions).
When You Lose Access to your Data
When you lose access to your email account abruptly and without warning, you need to immediately update your email contact information with all accounts you have elsewhere, plus you need to alert all of your email contacts that you have lost your email service.
Worse, however, is that we typically save various messages – often important ones – in online folders for future reference. For example, emailed receipts or invoices.
When your account is cut off, you lose access to potentially substantial amounts of critical information. Effectively, Mail.com is stealing your personal data – and their terms of service even spell out that they can do this.
Furthermore, Mail.com does not tell you anything about the “irregular activity”. You have no way of knowing if the security breach is potentially worse – has your personal information in your account or folders been accessed? This is a critical security problem. What happens to the data in your account after they block it? Is the information securely erased?
- MAIL.COM’s account death sentence, without any explanation, is 100% unacceptable from any provider and renders their email services 100% unreliable.
- By not providing an explanation, we do not know if there are other legitimate security issues that we need to address.
- By blocking access, without warning, and providing no recourse, Mail.com effectively steals your intellectual property (again, which they assert a right to do in their terms and service agreement).
- Other online reviews indicate our experience is not unusual with Mail.com.
Empirically, Mail.com is 100% Unreliable. Based on our actual experience outlined above, we strongly recommend avoidance of MAIL.COM
Their customer service is awful – there is no way to contact them except through a single online form with a 24 hour turn around (others report turn around time up to days to weeks).
They claim to have excellent customer support. When they offer no assistance on issues as critical as loss of all your email and provide no information about their actions, their customer support claims are empirically false.
Unfortunately, there is no way to contact the company. They refuse to acknowledge any further contact through their online customer support feature. It is impossible to ask them for their perspective on the items outlined above.
Lessons learned
- NEVER EVER USE MAIL.COM
- NEVER RELY ON THE CLOUD FOR CRITICAL DATA
After this, I am transferring important items like emailed receipts, documents and other data to offline storage and/or printing them on paper.
Switched to Outlook.com
I have switched to reputable nline mail services offered by Microsoft and also to my own email server that I control. Using the Outlook email application, mail that was been stored in cloud email folders is also configured to be stored as a local copy on my own computer. This is a fantastically better solution than cloud-based only systems like Mail.com.
Keywords: MAIL.COM REVIEW, MAIL.COM ACCOUNT BLOCKED, MAIL.COM SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY, IRREGULAR ACTIVITY
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Update: Many people have had problems with them in the past, exactly like others are also reporting this week. There are many reports on Twitter this week of others losing access to their email too. A online comment at an online forum looked up their server IP address and found that their servers are blacklisted by anti-spam systems. This suggests defects are causing their systems to be either hacked or abused for the purpose of sending spam – indicating they have little idea how to manage an email system.
CONFIRMED: As of Feb 16, 2018 at least one of their IP addresses is blacklisted on anti-spam lists. I confirmed that the IP address 74.208.4.200 belongs to 1&1 and it is presently blacklisted.The second 1&1 IP address I checked later is also blacklisted.
Their terms of service say they can and will terminate your account and delete your private data, for any reason what so ever, whenever they feel like, without warning.
There are rumors online that
1) mail.com’s servers were hacked (this has reportedly happened before)
2) mail.com had a pre-announced system upgrade about 24-48 hours prior to the loss of accounts. The rumor is the upgrade failed.
3) As a consequence of either (1) or (2), mail.com is said to have possibly lost all user data connected to the accounts,
4) Or, that mail.com routinely blocks access to free accounts if the user does not convert the free account to a paid premium account within a few months.
I have attempted to contact mail.com through their online customer support tiny-form and via Twitter and they have not responded to anyone. It appears that you cannot get telephone support unless you upgrade to a paid premium account. Does that mean blocking accounts and then having to convert to a paid account to contact support to restore service is a protection racket? We have no way of knowing as Mail.com does not respond to customer inquiries.
Avoid all use of 1&1 and mail.com products and services. Run away fast.
Update 2/27/2018
Two weeks later they sent this insulting email. I have a B.S. in computer science, an M.S. in software engineering and have taken additional graduate course work in information security. You’d think I might know a few things… they still have refused to provide any information as to what their security systems detected. My mail.com account remains blocked. I have moved everything to a Microsoft hosted email system which has been secure, solid and reliable.
Update February 28th, 2018:
And … the account remains blocked in spite of what their tech support said.
Update March 5, 2018
And at last, 3 weeks later, I can now log in again to my mail.com email address. I have already switched over 149 accounts, groups, vendors, etc, to my new email address, plus am now forwarding all of my stored mail, from mail.com to my new email address at a new service provider.
My account at mail.com had been set up as my primary email address for handling all email correspondence. Being abruptly cut off for 3 weeks, with no explanation, and initially, with a statement from the vendor that I was cut off permanently, is insane.
And then at the very end – after spending 3 weeks blaming me, they acknowledge in the brief note above, that “Our systems had not been updated properly”. This was their problem all along, not mine as they insinuated early on, and it had never been my problem.
Update 2022 – I have never used mail.com services again.
