GMX is not as well-known as the big names that dominate the free email landscape. However, it meets all your basic emailing needs. Message composition, contacts, organizers and more are all present and work well. It also has a couple standout features, including the ability to directly import contacts from your social media accounts, making it one of the best free email services if you're looking for a lesser-known provider.
GMX has a lot of great features in addition to simple email. For example, you can customize your account with a color or theme that fits your personality. You can add a picture of yourself, or create an avatar. You can also use the GMX instant chat feature or video chat with friends and family who also have a GMX account.
GMX free email service review: Main features
Setting up a free email account with GMX is easy. You’re asked for some basic information, name, birthdate and the country you live in. You then choose an email address and password.
The biggest drawback we noticed while testing GMX is that there are a lot of ads. The inbox is cut into several mini view windows, with most hosting an ad for other GMX services, though there are affiliate company ads, too. This makes it look very cluttered, and it can be hard to find the true inbox you need. Because of this, we found it difficult at first to work with the email service, but eventually we found tools and functions we needed.
GMX is one of the few free email providers that lets you directly import your Facebook contacts into your address book. It also has an integrated task calendar so you can set up appointments and email invites, and the program automatically reminds you when the event is close.
You can create alias email accounts to use for online subscriptions or accounts that won’t show your personal information, but will still feed right back into your primary GMX inbox. You can also use the mail collector to redirect your other email account messages into your GMX inbox, putting all your incoming email in one place.
GMX includes an autoresponder that automatically sends a reply to received emails during a designated time. This is a helpful feature if you ever can’t respond to messages right away.
We also discovered that GMX has a 50MB limit on attachments. Most other free email accounts limit attachments to 20MB or 25MB. GMX lets you attach files saved on your computer’s hard drive or from cloud storage programs such as Google Drive, and you can attach multiple files at once.
When you send a message GMX has a count down before the message is finally sent. This gives you a few seconds to cancel the message, just in case you need to edit or reconsider the message. While the other email providers we tested, such as Gmail, automatically create a contact when you send an email, GMX doesn’t; instead, it gives you the option of adding the contact to your address book.
The GMX email app was much easier to use than the web-based interface, especially since it didn’t have ads that cluttered the view screen. It was much easier to navigate and we easily found the tools we needed. The app can also optimize the attachment sizes to save space while sending. This doesn’t affect the files as all and they will be the same size and format when downloaded. We did have a few issues with the app: It took a while for messages to send, and we couldn’t find contacts that were saved in the web-based account.
We tried out GMX’s support features. The best way to get ahold of support personnel is through email. However, after you fill out the online form, GMX sends you an automated reply with a link to the online FAQs and another email address where you have to send a second request if your question isn’t answered in the FAQs. This set of extra hoops caused us some frustration, especially since we had to wait an additional 36 hours before finally getting a reply.
Should you try GMX free email service?
GMX is a good email service that will meet your needs of a free email account. The number of ads make it hard to locate the features and functions you need at first, but once you get the hang of it, this free email service has a lot of useful tools, such as video chat and mail collecting. The biggest plus of GMX is that is directly imports social media contacts.
