Tech Bitch

GMX (Global Mail Exchange) is a major branch of United Internet AG, a stock-listed company in Germany in e-mail service provide. To be honest, I’d never heard of the company until I saw a double-page colour ad in a popular computer magazine touting ‘The Ultimate Choice for Webmail’. So I thought I’d explore…

GMX was founded in 1997. In Europe, GMX offers a free Web mail service called ‘GMX FreeMail’, which currently has about 10,000,000 active users in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, according to the company. That’s no small number! In November 2007, GMX launched an English language service called ‘GMX Mail’ (reviewed here) with its own data centre in the U.S. and a different range of features than in the German language version. Like the European version, the English version remains completely free of charge.

GMX provides solutions for home users, as well as small and mid-size companies. Because GMX Mail is Web-based, it’s accessible from any computer connected to the Internet (just like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and others). More importantly, its features and convenience rival those of traditional client-based software that require installation on your computer - and it’s completely free! Of course, without an Internet connection you won’t be able to read, send or receive any messages - unlike offline mail clients such as Outlook which download all messages onto your computer.

GMX Mail offers a number of time-saving mail management tools. It’s also really pretty (looks a lot like MSN Live Hotmail,), and the interface is simple and uncluttered (are you listening Google?). A focus of the new service is security - the company claims that it draws on many years of e-mail expertise and offers sophisticated spam and virus protection for up to 98% fewer spam e-mails.

GMX’s virus protection is based on McAfee and Symantec scan engines, helping to locate viruses, worms, and Trojans - even in compressed file formats. GMX mailboxes are protected from spam with seven anti-spam modules, resulting in a good clearout of junk mail. Also important is uptime - GMX guarantees optimum performance with data centres located in Europe and the U.S. I’ve only been using the service for a few days so can’t really vouch for spam credentials, but in that short space of time I’ve had very little junk delivered - much less than Gmail in fact.

GMX Mail provides 5GB of free e-mail storage (maximum 50MB per attachment), and 1GB of additional free file storage for photos, MP3s and other files. This fares very well against the leading mail clients. E-mail names are available for the domains @gmx.com, @gmx.co.uk or @gmx.us, and changing e-mail names after registering is even possible. It also supports all the popular mail protocols (POP3, IMAP and SMTP), allowing you to import up to 10 e-mail addresses to your new mailbox.

The ad-free (e-mails actually have a GMX ad link placed at the bottom of the message) and non-cluttered interface is intuitive to navigate, though some may find the constant opening of new windows a little irksome. Easy formatting of e-mails and organisation is achieved by drag and drop, and a proprietary ‘mail collector’ allows collection of mails from third-party accounts in a single mailbox. There’s also an address book for online contact management, and it’s compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X using Internet Explorer or Firefox.

GMX Mail is flexible and easy to use. Even seemingly complicated tasks like switching e-mail accounts is a breeze. Thanks to the GMX Mail Collector, all messages from your existing accounts will be collected and sorted into separate folders in your GMX mailbox. If you’ve tried all the other free e-mail services but still aren’t happy, it certainly won’t hurt to give GMX Mail a spin. [6.5]

Adding another trick to their toolkit, spammers are now abusing the ‘out of office’ feature of Web-based e-mail services to relay their junk messages into the inboxes of unsuspecting Internet users. I can’t believe it has taken so long. Anti-virus boffins have recently seen several instances where spammers set up Web-based e-mail accounts and configure auto responders with spammy messages. The miscreants then sent e-mail with fake ‘from’ addresses - the spam targets - to their newly created Web-mail accounts. The ‘from’ addresses subsequently receive the spammy ‘out of office’ notices.

This may sound like a convoluted way to send spam, but spammers do it to trick spam filters. An automatic reply from a well-known Web-based e-mail service will look legitimate to many spam filtering tools. Unlike spam sent by botnets, the auto reply spam will have a legitimate sender and will be signed with the correct signatures used to sign e-mail messages, such as DKIM, DomainKey or Sender ID.

One spammer seen using this technique is advertising an adult Web site - no surprises here! The auto-responder spam does not look like a typical out of office reply. The message subject does always contain ‘Re:’ because that’s added by the Web mail service, but the spammer controls the rest of the subject line and the message body text. In the examples a popular anti-virus manufacturer could only determine that the mail is an auto responder by carefully looking at the e-mail headers.

I suspect the spammer has a program that automatically creates accounts and sets the responder text, all with no manual work required. This gives the spammer the capability to have lots of Web-mail accounts, all used to spam lots of people. All is not lost: the spam should be blocked by a decent anti-spam product through a combination of header and message content checks.