The Bottom Line
Aimed at professional users, Zoho Mail could be even more helpful organizing mail, identifying key messages and contacts, and sending oft-used replies.
Pros
- Zoho Mail includes ample storage and offers POP and IMAP access
- Labels and comprehensive search help you organize mail
- Zoho Mail comes without display advertising
Cons
- Zoho Mail cannot access other IMAP accounts
- While Zoho Mail offers templates, you cannot use them for canned replies
- Zoho Mail lacks saved searches and self-learning folders
Description
- Zoho Mail is a free email service with unlimited online storage (with quotas for mail sent and received per day).
- You can set up Zoho Mail to retrieve mail from POP accounts and send from its web interface using all your addresses.
- Zoho Mail itself can be accessed in email programs and services via both POP and IMAP.
- Folders and labels let you organize mail. Rules offer some automation, and a spam filter files junk out of the inbox.
- Zoho Mail includes Zoho Chat instant messaging and offers some integration with Zoho apps and Google Docs for attachments.
- Email conversations can be read in context with a tree view. Zoho Mail can automatically archive old mail.
- Templates let you save email text for later re-use, and an outbox can delay mail delivery for some time to allow unsending.
- Business hosting plans let you use Zoho Mail with your own domains and email policies (for, e.g., quotas and access).
Guide Review - Zoho Mail - Free Email Service
You get ample storage with Zoho Mail — unlimited space for personal accounts accompanied by enough traffic allotment —, and you can set up other email accounts inside Zoho Mail for sending and receiving mail. Unfortunately, the latter only works for POP but not IMAP accounts.
What works via both POP and IMAP is accessing Zoho Mail: you can set it up in your favorite email program on your desktop or in your palm, or have Zoho Mail forward new messages to any email address. A nice addition would be having it forward only certain messages using filters. Zoho Mail's rules, in general, are a tad limited in the actions they can take.
The basic functions are there, though: filters can delete or file mail based on various criteria, and they can assign labels, too. The labels come in colors with Zoho Mail, and — together with the swift, powerful search — help organizing and retrieving mail. Being able to save search criteria as folders would be helpful, too, as would be self-learning folders. The spam filter does learn, of course, and in my tests had to be taught a good deal of good mail.
Zoho Mail does integrate email with its other applications and Google Docs somewhat. You can easily share documents, for example, and add leads to the customer relationship management app or note events, but the interaction often is sparse. Zoho Mail does not detect dates, for example, and searching for a contact's mail requires copying and pasting their address. The integrated Zoho Chat can talk to many an instant messaging network.
Zoho Mail comes with handy keyboard shortcuts, and its (automatic, if you want) archiving is a welcome way to keep folders clean. In some places, feature, button and menu count seems to have won against simplicity, though.
User Reviews
They fail to tell you the limitations to the free account. This is my experience so far. 1. Limit 250 sent mails per day. If you go over that your account is blocked. Their reasoning is to control spam. Which is fine but it's not disclosed when you sign up for an account anywhere. 2. 10mb size limit on attachments. Again nowhere is this disclosed and if you go over, well, your account gets blocked. 3. 10 bounced emails per day. You guessed it. Your account gets blocked. 4. There is also a limit to ""incoming"" mail. I do not know the limit. When I asked in the forum I noticed all my posts are now being moderated. The only way to get your account unblocked is to go to the forum and post that you were blocked. Most people there have no clue as to why they were blocked in the first place. That said. I have no problem whatsoever with any of the limitations. I do have a problem with not disclosing them up front. They have no mention of anything in the FAQ, and if you ask too many questions it seems you soon get moderated and your post never go up. Sign up for an account and just lurk the forums. While it is a very clean interface, Zoho Mail has many bugs that do not seem to get attention. For me the biggest is the auto refresh is clearly broken. I have to manually refresh the page in order to get the new mail. There are several threads on this topic in the forums. Not ready for enterprise by a long shot.
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