The chances are that you will have heard of GMX, but the chances are that you also won’t have used its services. The press release I hold before me triumphantly claims that 100,000 UK users have now signed up to its free email service at gmx.co.uk – but that’s still a few shy of Google Mail.

So, the difference. Interestingly, the first line Robin Rudat, head of GMX’s Mail Services International, came out with was privacy: “We use the idea of a piece of mail. The subject line is free [to index], but the content is like a closed letter – we can’t access this.”

Essentially, GMX is out-do-no-evilling Google.

At present, there aren’t any adverts on the service, but of course it can’t go on like that forever: GMX is part of 1and1, which prefers in general to make money from its services. We will, apparently, see adverts appearing in the second half of this year (they’ll appear as banner ads at the top of the home page (where it currently says, “Welcome! Your Ultimate Choice for Webmail”).

Another interesting approach is a weekly development cycle. GMX claims it has a highly active community of people suggesting ideas. For example, when you drag and drop an email into another folder it previously didn’t open up any subfolders. Someone pointed this out and within a week the feature was made live.

There are lots of other nice features too. The way it can pull in all your webmail accounts (not just POP3 ones like the rest can, but non-POP3 ones too) and let you reply to them as if you were replying direct from that account; integrated file storage (you get 1GB for free), so that you can save attachments direct from an email; support for all the major browsers, including Safari.

It’s all nice and good, but is it going to be enough to pull people away from Hotmail and Google Mail?

I remain to be wholly convinced – especially as there’s still no IM integration and no wider package of office applications to tie into. One thing in its favour, though, is that because far fewer people have signed up for the service it’s more likely you’ll be able to get the email address you want.

If you’ve used GMX I’d be interested to know what you think about it, and also if you’re a current Hotmail or Google Mail user what would it take to move you away? Isn’t it enough, in the end, that it just works?