Get a Free E-mail Account from Zoho Mail

The busy bees at Zoho just took the wraps off Zoho Mail, a free e-mail service that trumps Gmail in one key area: offline support.

By leveraging Google Gears (ironic, no?), Zoho Mail lets you read and compose mail even if you're between Internet connections (like when you're traveling). It also offers both hierarchical folders for organizing mail and Gmail-like labels. Likewise, you can view your mail in a series or as conversation threads (again, Gmail-style).

Zoho Mail integrates with Zoho Chat so you can chat while messaging. It's also optimized for iPhone viewing. In short, it's a pretty robust e-mail solution, though I'm bummed it doesn't offer IMAP (for the moment, anyway). On the plus side, it can retrieve mail from other POP accounts and send mail as though it was coming from any of those accounts -- meaning it's more or less transparent to the recipient.

I really like what I've seen of Zoho Mail so far. It seems quite capable, and the interface is tab-tastic. That said, does the world really need another Web-mail solution, what with Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, and all the rest? Is there enough here to make you switch -- or at least try it out? [via Download Squad]