Elliot: Wowmail Connection
ISleuth's PR releases were making a big deal about the traffic they expected to receive from their status as the official search engine of Wowmail, so I tried to find out more about the Wowmail service to gauge the potential benefits. Here is what I found.
A search on Altavista yielded about 2,800 pages referring to "Wowmail.com", (versus 2.2 million references to HotMail). With Netscape you get an error if you go directly to wowmail.com, so try wowmail.com.
There are at least 650 providers of free email service. emailaddresses.com
Wowmail has historically been associated with internet porn. Here is a review from fepg.net
"At the other extreme is wowmail. This site is very adult-oriented with links to other "adult" sites, newsletters, etc. It offers a selection of domain names (you can pick which one you want to use every time you send an email). The domain names offered vary from "wowmail.com" and "infamous.com" thru "letsmakelove.com" and "bi-f.com" or "bi-m.com". If you're looking for a site to do some flirting from, this could be for you! This site is definitely not for children, it has links leading to places you probably wouldn't want them to visit. "
A search of the developer of Wowmail, ABC-web Ltd, yields several porn sites they own, including.
Eureka, a service for delivering porn via email. eureka.abc-web.com
Adultbrowsers.com, an adult web browser. adultbrowsers.com
Hooray, an adult search engine. eureka.abc-web.com
I signed up for the Wowmail service and found it to be extremely weak. They don't have many basic features that other free services provide, such as:
Address Book
Folders for incoming outgoing or sent email.
Filters for spam.
Spell Check
Why someone would sign up for Wowmail versus one of the other far superior free mail services such as HotMail or Yahoo mail, I can't figure. Actually, iSleuth doesn't use Wowmail as its own email provider. Their service is provided by Outblaze, a Hong Kong company that provides co-branded services for 25 other sites in exchange for shared ad revenue basis. outblaze.com
Bottom line, I don't see huge traffic coming from Wowmail connection. I also don't care for strategic partners whose main business appears to be internet pornography....unless it was Playboy ;-)
Regarding the increase in traffic from December to January, as a web developer I know it is possible to have very large swings between certain months, December to January being one of them. We need to look at a larger data set to determine if there is a real upside trend.
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