Free Email Services

There are a number of places where you can park your email address. The best known are Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail service.

For a fairly good list of email services, go to Free Email Address Directory or do a Google search for "free email address" which will return over 12 million "hits". The Free Email Address Directory has a good definition of the various types of services along with lists of each type. They also provide news bulletins about changes to various services that they track.

Expect to put up with some advertising gimmicks on any site your use (that's how they make their money). Be careful to pick a site that doesn't farm your name out and that provides SPAM filtering. Yahoo and Hotmail both attempt to filter SPAM as do many others.

If you wish to download your mail and read it off-line (a wise precaution that tends to stop the spread of viruses), choose a POP3 or IMAP account.