Gmail has another competitor, this one coming from Middle Earth. The Hobbits over at Planet-Tolkien.com have launched Shiremail, an email service that offers a 1 gigabyte storage amount for its members. Because they were not blessed with Google’s resources, Shiremail costs members 3.50 (pound sterling) a month.
Planet-Tolkien was launched as a portal for fans of the writer’s work. The site is designed to feature many of the attributes that one would expect from a portal site. However, these features have a distinct Tolkien/Lord Of The Rings feel and subject. Keeping with this theme, the group decided to call their email service Shiremail.
Shiremail, from their description, “offers a value for money ad-free email service including three separate industry standard virus scanning technologies, real-time spam filtering, customer support, and one gigabytes worth of mail storage all for just 3.50 [pound sterling] a month.”
Some of the features offered by Shiremail include:
* Personal Folder Creation for easy to manage mail storage
* Diary Calendar for remembering important dates and staying organized
* The ability to change the way that shiremail.com looks and displays information to you
* Downloading of email from other pop3 mailboxes to your account on this server.
* Automatic mail checking with Message Highlighting based on certain criteria
According to their about page, Shiremail was “developed by web developers Madfolk who operate the hugely popular Planet-Tolkien.com website in conjunction with gradwell dot com Limited, a leading UK Internet Services Engineering Provider.”
In an article by News.com, Tarrant Costelloe, founder of Planet-Tolkien.com said that the new email service, which was launched last week, has already signed up 1800 customers.
“We’re trying to build up features to start charging for services, and we had a good idea people were interested in e-mail,” Costelloe said. “We originally thought about providing 10MB service, but we knew Google was going to do 1GB, so thought we’d try to get in there first.”
I imagine that Shiremail, keeping with the LOTR theme, is the one email service to rule them all.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
