MyOwnEmail.com. At first glance, a wondrous free
email site with amazing opportunities. Yes, I did say FREE!. But sadly,
all is not as it seems to be. In fact, this site has been seemingly
lost forever into the dark depths of CyberSpace, due to some problems
with the servers in Pakistan. Why the servers were in Pakistan is
anybody's guess. And how did I find out about this problem? No, the
email site did not inform me, as a customer, about what was going on.
Instead, I had to endure several weeks of not being able to access
important emails, and had to search myself on the internet, stumbling
by chance across a forum discussing the very problem. This was where I
finally realised that I may never be able to read those emails that I
had not yet been able to check before the site went down, not to
mention losing several contacts' email addresses into the bargain.
Admittedly, I should have been more careful and had back-ups. But how was I to know?
Anyway, before the site went down forever (or so it seems) I have to
admit that it did have its advantages. Yes, it was free. And like no
other service available, it provided over 200 domain names to choose
from, all without having to pay a penny. For months, I was the proud
owner of an email address reading "md@hehe.com" and other similarly
inane, but amusing names!
Sadly the actual service provided never was anything to recommend. The
user interface was very poor, not being at all attractive, although
fairly easy to manoever.
However, there appeared to be no controls
whatsoever on what could slip through the server. Every day, I awaited
at least 3 spam emails, and a further 3 which I suspect contained
viruses, as they attempted to install a .exe program on my computer
upon opening. Also, it was a not a choice whether I opened them or not-
as the email program was so poorly designed that the emails
automatically opened upon logging in.
Well, it's gone now. I shall miss it, despite all the problems, and I
will never forget shaking my fist in anger and frustration when it
would not even let me successfully upload a file. My original domain
names are gone, for which I did not pay a penny- a few months of fun
which I'm glad I had the opportunity to have. But we won't miss it for
too long, as there are far better services out there, and I would
advise nobody to rely solely on myownemail.com in the future, if it
ever returns into business. Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail have all provided
me with nothing but satisfactory services, although I do miss having an
original email address, where people would ask "Where on earth did you
get that?"