(This review focuses mainly on Green Options Media's free web-based email service, formerly…read moreplanet-save.com and now just planetsave.com)
A few years ago, I heard about a free email service that saved a certain amount of rainforest land for every email opened and sent. Interested in this concept, I checked out planet-save.com. I soon signed up for an email address and used this address to receive invitations to online surveys. I figured since I would be receiving so many emails (including spam) I might as well do some good in the process.
The email service itself was no frills, but it worked well enough. In fact, I kind of liked having a non-Yahoo!, non-Hotmail, non-Lycos (this was before Gmail existed) email address. So how did this saving-rainforest thing work? Well, each time a user opened or sent an email, planet-save.com would donate a small amount to a South American nonprofit tasked with protecting rainforest land. It seemed kind of weird, but the information on the website seemed legit, and it was ad-based, so the tiny amounts of land donated made sense. There was also a link you could click on to see how much land had been saved all together.
Things took a turn for the worse in November or December 2005. Planet-save's server went crazy for a couple of weeks at this time, so I didn't have access to my email. When I got access back, I didn't get any of the emails I had received in the interim. They were just lost. As I had been expecting a couple of emails in response to job applications, I was pretty upset about this. But the service soon returned to normal, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
A year-and-a-half later, planet-save.com changed its interface, and everything went to hell. The new interface, while nicer looking, took forever to load, and there were weeks at a time during which I couldn't go beyond looking at only my newest message. I wrote emails complaining about the new service, and although each one was answered by the founder of the company, the problem wasn't resolved. Eventually, he suggested I not use planet-save.com if I wasn't satisfied with it. He made some effort to resolve the problem, but after hearing from me a bunch of times, I guess he got tired of me.
A year or so later, and my account with planetsave has completely disappeared. So I can't access the emails I had saved, nor can I give the service another try. I'm all for supporting small businesses with unique models, but I also expect an email service to be reliable. Not having access to one's account for months at a time is simply unacceptable, and the customer service was severely lacking.
Basically, I think planetsave and the many other websites Green Options Media runs are just money-making schemes for the founder. A lot of the supposedly green information on the blog didn't seem very environmentally focused to me, and most of the advertising was big-business greenwashing.
I gave planetsave.com many chances, and it failed spectacularly and repeatedly. I wish it had never changed over to the new interface.
