Mail.com / outblaze.com Outblaze Takeover By IMB, Internet

I have had a free web mail address with Outblaze for over 8 years.

Outblaze is a Hong Kong based company that host web mail services under different web names, I was using Mail Asia under the Asiamail portal.

My reason for signing with them was to get away from the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo, the two main players in the free webmail game. Both these companies bombard the user with IM services that refused to be turned off, useless homepages, heaps of affiliate advertising etc, and an arrogant attitude with account deletion.

One could say they adhere to the American marketing model, i.e. dictatorial , arrogant, monopolistic etc. While am I bagging American marketing tactics I should mention the so called 'free download' scam that operates for software, once you have wasted your time you find software is not free, nor does it work properly until you have parted with the cash.

The other reason for web mail as most people would agree is ISP email addresses disappear with ISP changes, and web mail is a handy way of keeping spammers out of your main email account.

So this week November 2009, I go to sign in to my Mailasia account and I am redirected to Mail.com, ok not such a problem as I have a mail.com account ( for 5 months now), but when I entered my Mailasia User name/ password I got no such account message.

An internet search revealed that IBM has taken over Outblaze (April 09), so this sounds like Mail.com is a subsidiary identity of IBM, who have decided to axe all the outblaze free web mail accounts.

I searched for free webmail accounts, all the Outblaze alias web mail companies are being redirected to a Mail.com login page.

There was no attempt by Mail.com to contact me via Mailasia to inform of account cancellation or any announcement of a migration of services, just chop ..account gone, along with membership details and contact information.

My attempts to contact Mail.com have gone unanswered.

The problem may limited to a small number free webmail users, so anyone affected by this please step up and throw your pennies worth in ?