Report Card: Birdmail
 

Birdmail is an email website that allows you to earn points for using their email service. Additional points can be earned for purchases or referrals.

This is a rather quirky website with very strange rewards (do you want to redeem your points for a happy-face canvas lunchbag or an inflatable 99 cent beach ball?) but they also offer mileage vouchers with Alaska Airlines.

Without being able to provide referrals or making purchases, it would take you oh...maybe 20 years to get enough points to receive 500 miles. However, they do offer a generous number of points for your purchases and I am particularly fond of the link they have with www.Outpost.com which has great prices on computer equipment and accessories.

I have earned only 4,000 Alaska miles from this website over the last 12 months but each time I achieved 1000 miles, the vouchers have been mailed to me promptly in a hand addresses envelope from the Philadelphia area.

Their email service is not very reliable and many do not have interest in Alaska miles since they are regional. Lately, better rewards such as MP3 players and portable CD players have been added to the reward list but alas, no other mileage choices. Do keep in mind that Alaska miles can be redeemed for travel on Northwest, TWA and American.

I'll give them a C.

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I would give D. In case of Outpost, you have to spend $958 for AS 500 miles vs $125 with GreenPoint.

Lastly, its email service/interface just plain sucks. I won't list BirdMail on my website, no way.

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I wouldn't recommend Birdmail for an email sysem...they haven't been stable enough to depend on and email is just too important. But it seems pretty easy (to me at least) to get points. I generally get 5,000 to 10,000 points a day, clicking away while I'm doing other things. Alaska Air miles are 115,000 points for 500 miles and 210,000 points for 1000 miles. At 8,000 miles a day, it seems reasonable to get 1,000 Alaska Air miles a month.

(By the way, I don't have any referrals so all of my points are earned. I don't spend a lot of time on Birdmail but I've figured out the most efficient ways to get points. It definitely takes some experience.)

After a couple of months on Birdmail I have racked up 46885 points. I use this account for my junkmail e-mail lists. Another six months or so I should be able to get a 500 mile certificate.

The system is down a lot, if I was actually using it for regular mail I would hve dropped it a while ago.

Definatly a D rating for this one.

D-

In general it sucks ... BUT they have one feature I haven't found anywhere else that I really like.

When you download the messages, they stay on your server (just like you can do with Yahoo or Hotmail). However, when you delete the messages, they get deleted off your server (which you can't do with Yahoo or Hotmail as far as I know) but the one's you don't delete still stay on the server.

This is great when you're away and reading your e-mail, so when you get back and download the mail to your computer at home ... Voila! you only have the messages you didn't delete!

I wish I had been able to use it when I was in Spain for two weeks and my e-mail box filled up and I lost over a days worth of messages because the messages were stacking up and I didn't want to download them to a web based system.