Free email accounts offer a number of benefits, including easy accessibility from other computers and the ability to keep your email address when changing to a new internet service provider. However, free email account providers vary in features, quality, and reliability, so some thought should be given to the particular service you are going to use.
EMAIL ADDRESS: Generally, the larger and more well-known the free email provider is, the longer and harder-to-remember your email address will be. While you might have to take an address with several numbers at the end of it at a well-known free email service, some small free email services still have addresses like “@.com” available. Having an address you and your friends can easily remember is certainly more convenient.
RELIABILITY: Some services’ websites have less downtime than others, and some are also less likely to shut down. Generally, major providers like mail.Yahoo.com and hotmail.MSN.com aren’t going to disappear any time soon (although it is true that a few fairly large free email providers in the past have shut down or decided to require payment).
ADVERTISING: Free email account providers range from having little advertising to annoying full-page ads which have to load before you can go to the next page and read or send an email. Most also add a short text advertisement for their free email service at the end of each message you send. The only way to know just how much advertising there is within the account interface is to ask someone who already has an account or sign up for one. Heavy advertising on the rest of the website offering the email accounts may be an indication of this, however. Some providers offer to eliminate some or all advertising if you pay for a premium membership.
STORAGE SPACE: Accounts usually have a specific amount of email data they can hold before running out of space and rejecting email. This generally ranges from ten megabytes to one gigabyte (1,000 megabytes). This will vary depending upon the type of email you get, but the email messages I receive are an average of about 15K (0.015 megabyte) in size, usually ranging from 2K to 100K each. Even ten megabyte accounts should be able to hold hundreds of messages, unless some of them are particularly long or include large attachments. For example, a 5K message with a 640×512 pixel JPG image attached to it might take up about 150K (0.15 MB) or so, depending upon the complexity of the image. I would otherwise list the storage space limits imposed by different services, but these often change (usually becoming higher) so the statistics would likely become inaccurate.
ADDITIONAL BENEFITS: Some free email providers offer benefits for using their accounts, such as the chance to win prizes or using part of the advertising revenue to assist charitable organizations. For example, PlanetSave.com’s free e-mail account service indicates that it gives ad revenue to a charitable organization which helps protect the rainforest. Also, some services which are part of a larger web portal (like mail.yahoo.com) also give users access to other unrelated features of their website (such as Yahoo! Groups).
SIGN-UP REQUIREMENTS: Most services require a fairly long registration form to be completed (usually with some personal information like location, income, interests, etc). This information is probably used to target advertisements displayed on the service’s pages. Some sign-up forms have checkboxes for subscribing to online newsletters or registering for other offers, so be sure to read the form carefully. A few, like FastMail.FM, have short sign-up forms which only require the essential information. Google’s Gmail service requires that you enter a text message code they send you (so you need to have a mobile phone capable of receiving text messages) or have a current Gmail member send you an invitation, before you can sign up for an account.
After you sign up for an account, be sure to log in and thoroughly evaluate the service and its interface before giving anyone your new email address. Make sure the features work properly, try sending an email, see how much advertising there is, and how long the pages take to load. Make sure it is compatible with your web browser. Only after you are sure that it is the right free email provider for you should you commit to using it.
All information provided in this article was current as of February 2007
