Remar's Review on Free Email Services

• A permanent e-mail address accessible from any online computer.
• Special daily or weekly news briefs – you set the frequency. Hotmail offer USA Today's Daily News Briefing, Yahoo! offers "Hot Weekly Picks,", and Mail.com offers "Special Delivery."
• Personalized folders for saving e-mails and an address book. Groups of contacts can be created as well.
• All offer rich-text formatting for your outgoing messages, which includes font sizes, bullets, spacing and background colors. In addition, all offer a unique, personalized signature that you can create to end all of your e-mail messages with.
• All offer options to block spam or adult content
• All offer a directory of members. You decide if you want to be listed.
• All have virus-scanning software on all incoming e-mail messages.

1. Size of Account: 2MB – far and away the smallest of all the services. Outgoing message size cannot exceed 1.024 MB.
2. Design and Features: Extremely user-friendly design: non-obtrusive and colorful, interesting fonts with vibrant icons link to the many standard services that this e-mail account gives you. For instance, your lists of personal folders, your address book and your "options" tabs.
   
   If you're a MSN fan, you can link to services within the greater MSN site such as pager notification of new e-mail messages, a "Passport" service that allows you to use just one sign-in name and password for many web sites, and access to your e-mail from a web-enabled phone.
   
   A warning about Passport: many consumer groups have serious questions about the passport service, and have joined together to file suit against Microsoft. Click here for more info on this topic.
   
   Hotmail also offers a good "Instant Messaging" feature.
3. Advertisements: Small banners that blend into the design of the web site at the top of the inbox page. No pop-up windows yet.
4. Privacy Policy: Hotmail, as well as Yahoo! and Mail.com promises not to share your e-mail address with unsolicited businesses, and makes a special point to not share or sell member lists to any third parties. As we mentioned, they do share information with themselves – which is a lot of sharing, when you're talking about Microsoft.

1. Size of Account: 6MB of memory – second best of the services (with an option to purchase a 25MB mailbox for $19.95/year). Yahoo!'s a little better than Hotmail on outgoing attachments size: 1.5MB versus 1.024 for Hotmail, but Yahoo only allows 3 attachments with any outgoing message.
2. Design and Features: A more simple design than Hotmail. Yahoo! has several innovative features such as listening to your e-mail via phone ($4.95 month) and an option for a personalized domain name such as you@yourname.com. Cost: $35/year). Like Hotmail's links to MSN, Yahoo! also has many links to the services the Yahoo! browser homepage offers such as maps, weather, and auctions. Yahoo!'s homepage is also the most popular site on the net. A Messaging Service is offered as well.
3. Advertisements: Not obtrusive yet. No pop-ups yet. Unlike Hotmail, Yahoo features advertising from many companies, not just from one. That's probably good. But read any on-line advertising with caution in your mind.
4. Privacy Policy: A very comprehensive policy which goes into depth about specific privacy issues, such as cookies and information about the Yahoo! server. Yahoo! also tells you the instances in which your information will be shared. For instance, if you're on the auction site or if they are served with a court order. Yahoo! even tells you about their encryption devices. Lots of good information, and then this: "Yahoo! allows other companies that are presenting advertisements on some of our pages to set and access their cookies on your computer. Other companies' use of their cookies is subject to their own privacy policies, not this one." Yikes! At least they tell you. Other companies generally aren't that specific.

1. Size of Account: 10MB – the biggest. A bit larger than Yahoo! on attachment size – 2MB (the entire size of a Hotmail account!), but, as with Yahoo!, Hotmail only allows 3 attachments.
2. Design and Features: A very bare bones design with no special fonts, icons or background colors.
3. Advertisements: Since Mail.com is entirely advertisement driven (unlike Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, which have the larger services of Yahoo! and MSN to support them), Mail.com inundates you with banners, windows and pop-ups – two at a time in some cases – as soon as you enter. On some pages, the advertisements actually dwarf the content! Definitely the worst of all 3 from an advertising point of view. But, who cares, if you can ignore the ads?
4. Privacy Policy: Comprehensive like Yahoo!, but Mail.com goes even more into specifics concerning their use of cookies. It offers to send unread e-mail after a prolonged period of time to an alternate address. Children's policy: Mail.com doesn't allow children under 13 to have an e-mail account on their site. It also has a modest section on how to protect your privacy on the Net at large.