Free email accounts are great! Thye can help separate work from fun email. They are good options for kids. They are good options when you have an ISP that keeps changing their name, thereby changing your email address. As promised last week, I’m outlining a few of the free email options out there:

Gmail – This is Google’s free email offering. I know some folks who love it!

Pros – you can import contacts from other email accounts; search feature is second to none; you can report spammers in an effort to filter out the bad guys.

Cons – keyword ads are placed on the mail pages; due to search features some feel Gmail is (or soon won’t be) private. Interesting – because of the extensive search feature, Gmail encourages you to “archive” messages rather than delete them.

Yahoo Mail – Yahoo mail has been around for quite a while.

Pros – it works for a lot of people; you can receive messages up to 10MG (good for photos); it integrates with Yahoo Messenger.

Cons – Yahoo has been known to change it’s privacy policy, which could mean sharing your address with third parties

FastMail – I don’t know a lot about Fastmail but in doing research it caught my eye.

Pros – you can access Fastmail from Outlook and other email clients; (In other words it supports POP and IMAP access.) you can choose from a long list of domain names to use.

Cons – does not support encrypted messaging; does not store a lot of mail.

If you are looking for other options, About.com has a nice list of their top 10 favorite free email options.