Are you signed on to a free e-mail service and have you had any

problems?

I've heard of yahoo, gmail, and hotmail. Any pros or cons out there about these? Thanks!

a hard time accessing my charter email at work - I've had no problems, very very little spam (they have a pretty good filter) and I can access it anywhere which is why I got it in the first place.

and don't want to give out my real name or e-mail address. I haven't had any problem at all.

Don't know about the others.

:hi:

and I really do not have any problems with either. Use one mostly for political and the other for personal.

Although to be fair, while I have Gmail accounts, I generally don't use any online email services, but I'd always pick Google over anyone else.

I dumped all the others long ago..

It's fast and gives you 2 GB.

I can invite you to GMail if you want.

It is fast.
How much they spy on your e-mail, I wonder?

It blows Yahoo and Hotmail away.

had some problems recently, so I switched to gmail. I like it better than Yahoo so far.

spam is unbelievable!!!

I have a gmail -- which I like for personal stuff --

I use their CHROME browser for the internet --

... addresses. Hundreds a week, and by obscene I don't mean penis-enlargement ads. They claimed that it must have been fraudulent use of "yahoo.com" and that they "took it seriously", but they insisted that I the user somehow break open the headers and trace it back to the source for them.

My provider's tech tried, my husband the computer programmer tried, and no one had any luck. The only thing that helped was a very good spam filter made available by my internet provider.

Hekate

They inevitably sell your details to spammers, so that's where all my junk goes.

I use Gmail for friends and my work email for work.

Having the three addresses keeps things nicely separated.

I can't recall any spam from my gmail accounts. Hotmail/Windows Live and Yahoo are horrible for spam.

It's also easy to configure your e-mail client for gmail (Outlook/Thunderbird/etc.) Not even possible with a free Yahoo account, and Thunderbird never seemed to "play well" with my old Hotmail account.

I've never had a piece of spam with gmail either. Have to wonder why google can't figure out how to get that same spam out of the search engine. Hmmm.

and haven't had any trouble at all for at least a couple of years. After you have the account for a while, you get TONS of storage space. A couple of years back it seemed like the login site was inaccessible often enough that I considered completely switching services but it's been so long since I've had trouble with it (knock on wood) that I can't even remember the last time.

But it is a BITCH to try to figure out a forgotten password. I had to eventually give up on a hotmail account I used to have because I could never adequately answer all the questions I myself had chosen and fill in the proper details I myself had provided! Maybe that's a good thing, though? :) Might be hard for someone else to get your password?

edited to add: I've had a yahoo address for ages and ages, but I only now use it for when i will NEVER want to hear back from whomever I'm providing it to. It got so full of spam (hundreds of messages a day) that it's unuseable now.

s

I've used a lot of different ones too.

All sorts of cool features/customizations to try. The combo of Chrome with Gmail is lightning fast.

Never had a problem with spam, outages, returned messages or access.

A few problems with attachments, but hey, it's still free.

yahoo and hotmail want me to pay to be able to download my email to a program instead of having to go on their site. it's also because yahoo and hotmail accounts get lots of junk mail because i've had them so long and it's impossible to get them to stop sending spam. as far as i know any of them are fine.

I'll catch non-spam in my spam folder.

One of them being that if/when your computer craps out, your email account remains intact. The only one I've ever had trouble with was Hotmail but that's because I used it infrequently and they auto-delete your messages if you neglect to log in after a period of time. I've had a certain Yahoo account for, heck, at least ten years and my oldest sent items are still there.

I have known for some time that I need to separate different kinds of mail, but have not had a clear picture in my mind of how to make it work. Thanks to all of you chiming in.

Hekate

~~Who the heck is unreccing this thread? My rec brought the count up to 0.

It's not free, though. I pay about $20/year for the account. It works great, has a wonderful spam filter, and screens all mail for malware.

Best of all, everything is stored on their server, and I have virtually unlimited storage space. I even use it for backing up files.

and now pay them the 20 bucks to get rid of the ads and let me use POP3. For a while I used a neat little thing called Ypops that let you download mail, but I still got the ads, and once in a while it wouldn't work. Yahoo is now unlimited storage, and I'm thinking about buying a domain.

Gmail has a lot of good stuff going for it, but I just don't trust Google to not peep at my mail.

this is what I don't get. I've heard it from people who use hotmail because they don't trust google. Microsoft, apparently is trustworthy.

here's the thing. unless you are using your own servers and PGP level encryption on both ends, your mail is being read by some machine. every single email, every page view, everything. and nothing is ever deleted. google is just more upfront about it.

be digging through my mail and browsing habits for marketing data.

Yes, email is an incredibly insecure way to communicate. If I actually had anything to hide, I wouldn't think of using it.

Best of them is Gmail IMHO.