Free E-mail Services (U.S.)

• Pluno Free E-mail 
  Here's a versatile free E-mail service that offers you 135 megs of space, as well as spam control and anti-virus protection. Pluno offers lots of helpful features, including auto responders, filters, an address book, calendar, and more.

• Walla 
  This ad-supported free E-mail service offers you a hefty 3 gigabytes of storage, as well as spam control and anti-virus protection. Note: you must be 13 or older to use this service.

• Mail2Web.com 
  This very useful Web-based "E-mail retrieval application" lets you easily access your E-mail from almost any POP3 or IMAP4 server. Mail2Web.com is free and requires no registration. Mail2Web.com differs from Web-based E-mail services like Hotmail in that it allows you to use your existing E-mail account.

• Smileymail.co.uk 
  Here's a good, basic free E-mail service that offers 7 megs of storage space. Smileymail.co.uk features a handy address book and gives you the ability to send and receive attachments.

• TheFreeSite.com E-mail 
  TheFreeSite.com offers its own free E-mail service. This service gives you 25 megabytes of space for your messages and you can send attachments up to 10 megs in size. Features include spam blocking and anti-virus protection and the service can be configured to allow you to read your POP mail, as well. Requires Internet Explorer or Netscape.

• Yahoo! Mail 
  Yahoo! Mail, currently the Net's most popular free Web-based E-mail service, offers a powerful package that includes such nifty features as spam filtering and password protection for outgoing E-mails. We particularly like the Norton AntiVirus feature, which automatically scans incoming E-mail attachments.
  • Note: In May 2005, Yahoo! Mail increased the amount of space available with its free accounts from 250 megabytes to 1 gigabyte (a decision likely prompted by rival Google's plans to offer 2 gigabytes of space with its Gmail E-mail service).

• BurntMail 
  (Note: BurntMail ended the free version of its E-mail service on March 1, 2004, but a 30-day free trial is still available). Here's a superb Web-based E-mail service that offers a lot of nice features such as spam protection, stationery, POP3 support and E-mail forwarding. A big plus to this service is that it doesn't plaster ads on your E-mails.

• Hotmail 
  Owned by Microsoft, Hotmail is the Net's second largest free Web-based E-mail provider, with over 170 million users. Hotmail offers mail filtering that allows you to direct mail into folders and also features a spell checker and a signature option, as well as the ability to customize the layout. You can add up to 20 recipients per message, as well as send attachments of up to 10 megs. Hotmail also offers its users the option of scanning E-mails and attachments for viruses.
  • Hotmail now offers 250 megs of storage space to users in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
  • Signing up for Hotmail's free service is confusing and cumbersome these days. You must deal with strong pitches for Hotmail's commercial, for-pay service, as well as page after page of ads that pester you to sign up for various mailing lists.