For anything you do online, basically, you’ll need an email address. Sometimes your internet provider offers one, included in your internet connection, but that’s getting less and less common these days. Having more than one email address can be useful. You might want to use them for different things, for instance to separate your work email and your personal email.
Whatever you want to use your email address for these are good, free email providers:
Webmail
It’s like you’d guess – email available through a web page. Of course, you’ll need to sign up through a web page for all kinds of email accounts. You’ll also need an internet connection to check your email, but you must know that already.
I use the following free providers:
Icerocket webmail
Care2 webmail
MailPuppy
Caring4Animals.com
They’re all good, and offer quite a lot of storage space. Of course they’re nothing like Gmail, which I haven’t tried myself. I’ve heard they keep all your emails indefinitely and they use your emails to display ads (which is reasonable, since they offer so much space, but I’m not sure I’d like it).
Then there’s something in between webmail and POP mail. It’s called imap. You can use that exactly as a webmail address, and just log on to the site, but if you prefer you can also set up your email program to check your email and download it onto your computer. Well, in a way. There’s also a copy left on the email server. That’s the main difference. You can check your email from home or from work or wherever you are.
Fastmail is a very good email provider. You get to choose between several different domain names for your email, but to tell the truth, most of them are kind of lame. I’d just go with fastmail.fm or something like that.
Then there’s POP mail, which means you really download your email to your computer and usually you get to email out as well. That means you won’t be able to access the same emails from somewhere other than where your email program is.
GMX offers a fantastic email service. You can collect all your other email accounts into one and you get lots of storage, again, not like Gmail, but good enough.
I also use Gmx.net (a German service) but now you’ll need to have a postal address in one of the German-speaking countries and the signup process is all in German. The same goes for any potential customer support. It’s all in German.
If you pay for your own web space, chances are you’ll get email addresses there too.
I use Eudora as my email program. If you’re a Mac user, like me, you also get Mail with your computer or you can download it. In the end, I decided to use Eudora, but Mail is very good too.