Beware of the free GMX email accounts

johnnybaloney · 19 June 2019 at 12:38PM

I've seen on this forum users recommending and/or praising GMX free email hosting so I thought I would chip in with my comments. As you may have guessed it already it won't be a very happy story

Until recently I was reasonably happy with GMX too. I would say not as good at filtering out spam as "the leading brand" but I liked the nice and short gmx.com domain. I have 4 email accounts with them, two of them I've had for something like 6 years.

Recently out of the blue one of my accounts was blocked by GMX. I contacted their customer service (i.e. filled out an online form) and they unblocked it. I took them 24 hours to unblock it, which I wasn't too happy about, but then it's a free service so I thought I had to accept possibility of such downtime. While I was waiting for my account to be usable again, I checked places like their Facebook page or Trustpilot - the reviews weren't encouraging (1 star out of 5). Eventually I got my account back so I thought it was just a hiccup.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, same thing happens again. This time I received a reply pretty quickly which said:

We have forwarded your request to unblock your account to our security department and it was determined that the account in question will remain blocked.

Please note that this is a decision made by our abuse department and we do not have further information we can provide to you.

That's it, end of story. Account blocked, data lost, no recovery option.

I have 3 more accounts with them and will be leaving them as soon as possible. This provider cannot be trusted.

While I'm at it according to Wikipedia GMX belongs to United Internet and their brands include Mail.com, 1&1 Internet and GMX Mail. Based on this experience I would not use those providers for any email or web hosting either.

Neil_Jones · 19 June 2019 at 6:43PM

Two things:

1) its a free email account, you get what you pay for so if something happens to the back end, don't expect priority service, or any service at all.

2) Don't keep anything important in any email account regardless of who it's with.

RumRat · 20 June 2019 at 1:35AM

Never had any problem with them in 10+ years. That said, I can see why you are upset.
I guess the email address in question has been hijacked somewhere along the line and it's being used for spam or something.
You should definitely recieved a better explanation.

Tom99 · 20 June 2019 at 5:05AM

I wanted a disposable email address and the same thing happened to me after sending one email.

johnnybaloney · 20 June 2019 at 9:52AM

Neil_Jones wrote: »

Two things:

1) its a free email account, you get what you pay for so if something happens to the back end, don't expect priority service, or any service at all.

2) Don't keep anything important in any email account regardless of who it's with.

As they say, if something is "free", you are the product. You can consider that cheap but still there is a certain minimum acceptable level of service that you should expect for that price. Occasional outages are acceptable but permanent blocking of an account without any warning and recovery option falls below that minimum level. From my experience, GMX mail does not meet the minimum level of service for "free" email accounts.

Your advice makes sense in particular when it comes to sensitive data but then there are messages that are of no use to anyone else but are important to you and you would not like them to suddenly vanish without trace one day.

johnnybaloney · 20 June 2019 at 10:11AM

RumRat wrote: »

Never had any problem with them in 10+ years.

Until several days ago I would have been in a lucky position to say a similar thing... So perhaps it's time to think "am I comfortable with my email account that I've had for 10+ years to suddenly disappear".

I'm a little upset because now I have to spend time on setting up a new account, migrating other accounts, updating my contacts, updating any references to my old email addresses etc. so quite a bit of unnecessary hassle. Fortunately I always keep copies of all my emails on my computer outside of the glorified 'cloud' but I'm fairly certain I'm in the minority, though. I suspect, for most a situation like this would result in all email history including current ongoing conversations gone forever so a pretty good reason to be really upset.

parcival · 20 June 2019 at 10:19AM

Thanks for posting about this.

I was just about to set up a new GMX account. Even if your experience is very rare your treatment is poor so I will avoid....

johnnybaloney · 20 June 2019 at 10:30AM

Tom99 wrote: »

I wanted a disposable email address and the same thing happened to me after sending one email.

May I ask who you keep the non-disposable one with?

eyeinthesky · 20 June 2019 at 2:43PM

I have been using gmx for years, but I use an email client (Thunderbird), downloading all email to my computer. Works well for me.

Beware of the free GMX email accounts

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