Let’s take a look at GMX Mail, its features and caveats.

GMX, with an interface similar to Yahoo! Mail, makes it very easy to import other email accounts and contacts – the wizard only asks for the email address and the password, everything else is automatically configured behind the scenes for you.

There’s nothing exceptional about GMX; Yes, it integrates iGoogle gadgets into the frontpage – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more – but do you really want that in your email application? Personally, I prefer simplicity, and the option to disable these add-ons if I don’t require them.

Although I missed the Gmail labels and the ‘conversation view’, I’d switch in a minute from an Yahoo! Mail account.

The usual suspects – an Address Book and an Organizer  – are also present. The File Storage section gives you 1GB of free space, without the possibility to upgrade. Share high-resolution photos with a couple of friends and you’ll risk running out of bandwidth, at just 1 GB/month.

You can use GMX as a proxy to get POP3/IMAP access from your Yahoo! Mail accounts – without paying the premium subscription. Import your account into GMX then set it up in Outlook, Thunderbird or any other email client.

Signing up for GMX now gives you the chance to have a short and personalized email address like “yourname@gmx.com”.

If it doesn’t impress you with its features or interface, will surely impress you with the fact that they don’t show ads. Yes, that blew my mind too. If you’re tired of those annoying credit score banners in Yahoo! Mail or the Adwords in GMail, be prepared to meet GMX.

Here’s an excerpt from an email conversation with Olivia Hine from Groshelle:

Q: I’ve been looking at GMX and it struck me that this service does not have a business model. No ads and no subscription fees? How is this possible?

A: […]UIG was founded in 1988 and has a market cap of $5 Billion US, 4,000 employees in the US, Europe and Asia.  The company has the largest global web hosting service, supports over 10 million domains, and has 50K hosted servers.  They already have a rate of over 5 billion emails a month through their service.[…]

A classic bait and switch, we don’t receive a clear answer regarding the question and instead we get some facts about the company – which, admittedly, is quite large. Pushing the envelope, I tried to bait and switch myself, giving an improbable reason for this no ads policy hoping to get a clear answer.

Q: And still, why would a corporation willingly choose not to monetize a service? My conspiracy mind would suggest a data mining scheme.

A: That is not the case, especially because GMX.com follows German privacy laws. Data of any kind is simply not available to anyone for any reason. GMX.com is a service that the company is offering, just as Google is offering Gmail.

Why would GMX, apparently defy logic, and remove any kind of ads from its service? It wants to attract users that need an incentive to switch from their current provider. After they reach a magical number of users, say 1 million, they flip the switch and start making money. At least that’s how I see things – this is not confirmed by GMX.

Gist – as its name suggests – helps you get the essence about your contacts, greatly improving my workflow these past days. Its algorithm sorted out all the duplicate contacts, a part which more than a few other apps have failed, and mashed everything together – pulling information from social networks, email and even news articles, and ranking the importance of one contact by the number of conversations and the date of the last contact.

By using this process it prioritizes news items in the Gist dashboard – grouped by Company and People – it gives you a sense of what’s happening right now  in your network of people and companies, putting you up-to-speed about the topics you care about. And the best part this service is that you don’t have do the legwork to make it work, just sign in, input your accounts and sit back.

Other notable features are:

• Attachments box which lists recent documents that you’ve received – don’t need to hunt them down anymore.
• Links box shows you recent incoming links – handy if you’re doing research on something or need to reference the link often.
• Syncs with the Outlook Calendar – and soon with Google Calendar.
• Import contacts in .CSV format.
• Manually adjust the importance of a person or add details.

This service is certainly angled at the work/business types – and is a must-have for anyone working with people, like public relations representatives, journalists keeping track of their sources or a company keeping track of its clients.

Gist is currently in private beta, and a lot of features are not yet implemented. Robert from the Gist team assures me that support for more email providers, Twitter and Mac OS X Mail app is on the roadmap. In my tests Gist was stable – no crashes or unexpected behavior; the user interface is simple and easy to use. I still feel a bit queasy about handing over my Gmail credentials, but their Privacy Policy is solid; they clearly state that they won’t share this information and once you delete your account, it is gone, not like Facebook who keeps you account dormant until you manually request deletion.

A downside to Gist is that it doesn’t have an offline mode like Google Reader or Gmail; if you don’t have an internet connection you’re out of luck.

I strongly recommend this service once it officially launches and invite everyone interested to keep an eye on their blog – which is riddled with interesting information about APIs, coding frameworks and announcements regarding the service.

If you want to send a movie of your lolcat, that is 150 MB, to your aunt Lilly what would you do? Or, maybe a PowerPoint presentation to business partners that has a lot of graphics?

Five years ago you probably had to split the file into multiple pieces and send each one over e-mail. Now you may use web services like FileDropper where you have a 5 GB size limit, but these type of services are not very reliable. Your connection may drop,  and you have to restart the upload process all over again.

Solution:

Luckily today there are two noteworthy alternatives for your large file needs, based on the BitTorrent protocol: PodMailing and Pando, both working on Windows and Mac (no glimpse of a future Linux client).

How does it work?

Pretty simple: drag & drop a file or a folder over the application window or the desktop/dock icon, specify the email address, subject and body text and click send.

The files are uploaded into the cloud (Amazon S3- Podmailing, own storage- Pando) and then seeded as a normal torrent files. When the upload is complete, if the sender remains online it will also seed the torrent along with the server. Same happens when the file is completely downloaded: the recipient becomes a seeder.

Besides email, Pando allows you to get a download link for IM or a web widget to put on your blog/page (feature not working on the Mac version in my tests).

How to receive files

Because they’re using a hybrid scheme, a combination of peer-to-peer (BitTorrent) and client-server model, the delivery is asynchronous. If the receiver is online, the transfer will start immediately, even if the file upload to the server is not yet completed. Also, the receiver can download the file at a later time even if the sender is offline.

As soon as the file begins uploading, the recipient receives a mail with instructions for downloading the file.

PodMailing offers three ways to download a file:

• direct http link to the file when the file finished uploading to the server
• using PodMailing client to open the .zed package (sort of a torrent file)
• using favorite BitTorrent client

The only option you have with Pando is to open the .pando package, which means if the recipient doesn’t have Pando he must install it in order to download the file. If a Linux user receives a .pando package he’s out of luck.

Resume support

If the upload is interrupted (lost connection, shutdown,etc) it will automatically be resumed when the application comes back online. If recipients start downloading the file when the sender interrupted the transmission, they will be able to get the chunk that has been uploaded to the server prior to the disconnect.

Same happens if the recipient’s connection is lost. It will resume downloading from where it left off when it comes back online.

Usabilty

Luckily, neither application require registration, which is always a big plus in the overall experience.

Both share a clean, simple and easy to use interface with two important tabs: Received and Sent.

The free version of Pando displays ads and you must complete a captcha before sending your first package.

One extra feature of Pando for Windows is Internet Explorer and Outlook plugins. While using Yahoo Mail or Gmail in Internet Explorer, when you try to attach a file larger than 5 MB a Pando pop-up appears asking if you want to “Pando” the file. If you choose yes, the file is replaced with a .pando package and the selected file starts uploading in Pando.

Limitations

With PodMailing you have no file size limit and no speed limit. The files are relayed by the servers for maximum 30 days. All that for free!

With the free version of Pando you can send files up to 1 GB in size, you have a throttled download speed, e-mail and IM packages are hosted on the server for 7 days and web packages for 14 days. The PRO version has a 3 GB file size limit, 5x faster download speeds and twice the length of hosting time. The PRO version is $24.95 a year.

Because of the underlying BitTorrent engine, on both services, if a file expires you can still get it from the original sender and other recipients, providing they are online and still have that file.

Conclusion

These two applications are very similar, both in look and functionality (although in my two days of testing, there were a few times when Pando didn’t want to upload the file to the server straight away).

Why choose PodMailing over Pando:

• PodMailing comes in one flavour: Free! (at least for now)
• Recipients are forced to install Pando in order to get the files, while with PodMailing they can download  files via a web link or BitTorrent clients.
• The limitations of the free Pando:1 GB file size limit, just 7 days of storage for e-mail/im packages, 5x lower download speed than the PRO version  and it displays adds, while PodMailing  has no file size limit or speed throttling and it allows 30 days storage. (In my tests the upload and download speeds of Pando were comparable to those of PodMailing’s )

Why choose Pando over PodMailling:

• It has a nice plugin for IE and Outlook
• You can easily get a widget for your blog so folks can download your stuff
• You can see how many times a file has been downloaded
• You can subscribe to full-screen TV shows, but this is not the subject of this article.