Summary: Free email services and accounts are convenient and ubiquitous. But free email services aren't the right place to keep your important information.
I've been receiving a lot of reports of problems with Microsoft's Hotmail free email service lately, and it really begs the question: are free email services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail worth the cost?
My position: Yes.
And: Absolutely Not.
As always, it depends on your needs and your expectations.
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You may be asking yourself, "What cost? Free email services are free, aren't they?" By now you should know there's no such thing as "free" - everything has a cost. It may not come out of your wallet each month, but there's definitely a cost.
Here are some of the costs I associate with free email services:
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In short, I would never recommend a free email service for anything that you consider important, or anything that you want to keep long term.
Here's how to judge: if the email account went away completely tomorrow, along with all the mail and contact information it contains, would it be an inconvenience or a catastrophe? If the later, then you need to get away from your free account. Now.
If your email is actually important to you, then spend a little each month to get a "real" email account from a regular ISP or mail service. Depending on the provider, each one of the 'costs' I list above will at least be diminished, if not eliminated.
But I did say that free email services were also worth it, didn't I? In fact, I have a Hotmail account, and a Yahoo account, and a GMail account. Why?
Free accounts are perfect when you don't really care what happens to them. They're great when you need to supply an email address to a company that you think may spam you later. Or if you need or want to remain anonymous or otherwise separate that email from your important stuff. Or for leaving as a contact address on a website that will probably get harvested for spam someday.
In other words, free email accounts are perfect throw away accounts. If you get something important that you want to save on one of those accounts, just forward it to your real email account, and you're safer.
But, for heaven's sake, don't use a free service for your primary and important email. You're just asking for trouble.
PS: as a side note, the problems I'm hearing about today all involve HotMail. My opinion stands for other free services like Yahoo mail - I get tons of spam on my Yahoo account. Today they seem more reliable, but I expect they'll have their own set of technical issues from time to time. Google's GMail service is not yet released - it's in beta - so it remains to be seen exactly how reliable or problematic it turns out to be. As you can imagine, I'm somewhat skeptical, and expect that it will fall into the same traps as Yahoo and Hotmail.
Related:
Ask Leo! - Why can't I access Hotmail?
Ask Leo! - How do I contact Hotmail Customer Service?
Ask Leo! - Can I automatically forward my Hotmail?
Ask Leo! - How do I transfer Hotmail contacts to another account?
Article C2217 - November 8, 2004
I have three "free" email accounts with no problem. Windows Live Hotmail and Opera Web Mail are the two best of the three that I have. Yahoo!, on the other hand, gives me tons of spam. I open the box just to check for anything important, then delete them. On Hotmail, I seldom get any junk mail, and Opera Mail is just as good as Hotmail, seldom do I receive junk. The only reason that I keep Yahoo! is for general email and one that I can freely give out. But they do a decent job of filtering the junk from the good.
Posted by: Charles Tilley at November 25, 2009 9:43 PMI use Outlook, but want to have web based access when traveling. How can I do that?
23-Dec-2009
Posted by: Pat Whitworth at December 22, 2009 4:17 PM
How do we balance this advice on "Free Email" with the issue of paid ISP email addresses becoming unavailable if I change my ISP. This has often been highlighted as one of the benefits of web based addresses independant of the ISP companies, so that it always remains my address even if I make a change of provider.
Posted by: Anthony at January 22, 2010 2:32 PMI have free hotmail email id as *****@msn.com. Does it support POP3 or IMAP.
Posted by: max at January 26, 2010 11:20 AMThanks
I can definitely tell you that having Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, or Msn.com isn't always worthwhile. I have blocked each of those domains from my own email, due to too much spam coming from all of them. Unfortunately gmail is the biggest account for spammers in the world, and they list hotmail addresses as their contact addresses a lot of times. If you're going to have a free email account make sure you can filter out domains as well as specific email addresses and names that may be used in the body, to make sure you never hear from that spammer again. The above may be popular domains for emailers but they are becoming anathema for people who hate spam, phishers and scammers, despite the legitimacy of these domains.
Posted by: Shiloh Reed at February 2, 2010 8:40 AM