Chess Mail

Chess Mail lists links to site where you can play correspondence chess.

      One site I would avoid is International e-mail Chess Club. You play by e-mail (not the server) under your real name. Although you don’t really need it, use of a free software program to keep records is invaluable because you need to keep track of the times when moves were received and sent and total reflection time. That’s a lot of records to keep without the help of a program like ectool. So why avoid the site? I recently registered there and was assigned a rating of 2060 based on my CCLA/ICCF rating. So what’s the problem? My rating very nearly puts me in the site’s top 100 players. What that means is they must not have a lot of members! Indeed, they advise that if you sign up for a tournament, there may be a long wait. IECG was very similar and last December they closed up shop for that very reason…it was becoming too difficult in this day of servers to find people who wanted t play using e-mail.
      Unfortunately Chess Mail hasn’t been kept up to date so many of the links don’t work. I post it though because if you are looking to play CC it has a list of places you can check out. My personal preference these days is Queen Alice which I reviewed here.