So I’ve gathered up a list of ten popular free email providers that you might want to take for a spin if Gmail or Yahoo are not your thing.

Hotmail

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href="http://www.hotmail.com">Hotmail is Microsoft’s email service, and I have to say this is one of the best services on this list (if not the very best). We’ve recently held a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/switch-hotmail-makeuseof-poll/">poll asking if you guys would be willing to switch to Hotmail, and most of you picked the answer that went “I will never ever consider switching to Hotmail. Ever“. Well, if you’re one of those people, I guess I won’t be able to sway your opinion.

But if you go to that href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/switch-hotmail-makeuseof-poll/">poll page and scroll down, you will see comments by a user who goes by the name of Galileo Vieira, a member of Microsoft’s Hotmail team. Galileo presents some fairly persuasive arguments as to why you should give Hotmail a chance. Their new UI is quite spiffy, and Microsoft are generally putting some energy into the service.

Is Hotmail better than Gmail (or even Yahoo, for that matter)? I would say definitely not, not by a long shot. But I would say that for most users, Hotmail is probably the best service on this list.

Mail.com

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If you feel that your email domain name is the most important part of the address, you should definitely check out href="http://mail.com">Mail.com. Its default domain name (@mail.com) is cool enough, and is even one letter shorter than you-know-who. But if you’re looking for something more specific, Mail.com offers an enormous list of alternative domains for you to pick from, such as “Engineer.com”, “Muslim.com”, and even “Secretary.net”.

It also boasts unlimited email storage, drag-and-drop labels, and more.

GMX Mail

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href="http://www.gmx.com/">GMX claims to be “the free e-mail you’ve been waiting for”, and boasts 13 million users. That may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to how many users the other vendors have, but it’s still a sizable amount. Some of the perks GMX provides include unlimited email storage, as well as attachments of up to 50MB each.

The service is based in Germany, and they also have an href="https://market.android.com/details?id=de.gmx.mobile.android.mail&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImRlLmdteC5tb2JpbGUuYW5kcm9pZC5tYWlsIl0.">Android app that seems slated mainly at German-speaking users.

Hushmail

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href="http://www.hushmail.com/">Hushmail is a bit more of an esoteric service. Their main claim to fame is that fact they provide “private, secure” free email accounts. Why the quote marks, you ask? Because Hushmail (quite famously) betrayed user trust in 2007 by providing email correspondence to federal agencies, complying to a Canadian court order. You can read a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/">complete analysis of the incident in Wired’s Threat Level column of the time.

In brief, what you should know is that Hushmail’s mechanisms are not completely secure, although they are still significantly more secure than those offered by other providers. Conversely, their free option only includes a paltry 25MB of storage – a far cry from the unlimited space offered by some of the other vendors on the list. If privacy is a key concern for you, check out Hushmail, but don’t blindly trust them. Configure your own settings, and don’t give them your encryption key at any stage of the process.

Zoho Mail

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href="http://zoho.com">Zoho makes a complete suite of online productivity tools, including a spreadsheet, a Wiki service, and more. Zoho Mail is their free email offering, and it looks quite spiffy. If you already use Zoho, that means you have a Zoho Mail account. One of its distinctive feature is that it is 100% ad free – not a single banner in sight.

Gawab.com

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href="http://www.gawab.com/">Gawab offers email tracking (a way to see if users received your email), 10GB of storage, and other goodies. But above all, it offers built-in support for foreign character encodings, such as Arabic UTF-16. If you write a lot of email in Arabic and are not happy with your current email provider, check out href="http://gawab.com">Gawab.

Final Thought

Did I miss an important free email provider? Are you using an unknown provider that is absolutely awesome, and are dying to tell the world about it? Share it all in the comments!

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