It would be hard to find a more appropriate domain for your email address than mail.com. And if that's not sufficient, 1&1 Mail & Media's mail.com webmail service offers a plethora of other domain choices. Beyond vanity email addresses, though, this Web-based email services offers a clear, attractive enough interface, and many of the features you find in much bigger players like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Outlook.com. You can read mail from other services, and your account includes free online storage space. Don't, however, look for extras like integrated instant messaging, let alone video calling.

Signup and Setup
Signup is pretty standard, requiring gender, name, date of birth, and country. You get quite a wide selection of domain choices: In addition to the basic mail.com, you can use email.com, usa.com, myself.com, along with dozens of other occupation or geographical choices. I chose birdlover.com! After choosing a password and typing in a Captcha, you're invited to view your brand-spanking new inbox.

Interface
For a lesser-known service, mail.com keeps up with the latest Web messaging trends. Each time you first visit a page, you get a help message laying out your options. The interface is by default a soft blue shade that's easy on the eyes, but you can select from 12 themes—not nearly the choice you get with Gmail or Aol Mail, but at least you get some options.

I didn't find the ads terribly annoying in mail.com, but if you do, you can banish them by purchasing a Premium Mail account for $19.95 a year—the same price as a Yahoo Mail Pro account. Also like Yahoo Mail's, the Premium account allows POP and IMAP access to your inbox, email forwarding, and phone support.

Like Yahoo Mail, mail.com uses tabs for Home, Inbox, messages, and searches. And like both that service and the new Outlook.com, in mail.com a message preview option lets you see the contents of a selected email while keeping the inbox list on-screen—something not possible in Gmail without an experimental plug-in. Like Outlook.com, the message preview can be below or to the right. Along the left side of the interface is a panel for folders and below that, contacts. You can add your own folders, subfolders, and "collector accounts." This is simply a way to read other webmail accounts inside your mail.com inbox.

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Unlike the newer services, mail.com doesn't dynamically update the mailbox when new email arrives: it checks for new mail every 3 minutes, which may be frequent enough for some users; otherwise you have to press the Check Mail button.

mail.com gives you some useful options for emails that contain photos: You can view them in a large slideshow viewer, download them as a zip, post them to Facebook, or store them to your account's included online storage. Other than for photos, mail.com doesn't give you any viewers for special types of mail, such as those containing video, shipping receipts, or social notifications, as Outlook.com does.

With your mail.com account, you get 2GB of secure storage space for files of any type, and you can even share access to it with friends. File attachments in emails can be up to 50MB—more than Gmail's 25MB limit for individual attachments, but less than Outlook.com's 300MB.

Calendars and Tasks

For calendaring and task management, mail.com uses GMX Organizer, which is accessible from a button atop the inbox. This calendar isn't as integrated as those you find in the other major webmail services; aside from the different branding, it only appears in a separate browser window, and doesn't maintain your chosen theme. Organizer is, however, a perfectly capable calendar and task manager, letting you create events with reminders, invitations, recurrences, and even discussions. You can import calendars in .ICS and .CSV format, but you can't subscribe to online calendars, as you can with Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail. The simple Tasks feature lets you assign due dates, priority (high, normal, low) and pop-up and email reminders.