Gmail.com would be a good one to try and my pic would be Yahoo.com for ease of use, but its downside is ...most likely to gather spam.

Both have longer than inactive time before they cancel. Most free webmail accounts will time out after 30 days or so of inactivity.

He may find that some popular email providers are blocked at the library or other public access sites.

www.yahoo.com I have been using this for many years without problem. He can save important mail, forward mail, etc. very easily. Gmail is fine also, I just prefer yahoo.

I prefer Hotmail as I have multiple dedicated accounts with them. Their spam filters have greatly improved to almost nothing. I found Yahoo to be too victimized with spam.

All in all I would think that they are pretty much the same. I guess it is like the "how do you want your eggs" question. Everyone has a personal preference.

DA

Most, if not all, free webmail accounts are closed when inactive for too long.

Hotmail Live is supposed to live 2 months without a login.
Gmail was 9 months.
Yahoo was 4 months.
- last I knew.

So can one just put their Gmail and Yahoo addresses in bcc and keep the accounts open indefinitely by regularly sending themselves copies - which is often useful anyway?

If I send myself copies often will Yahoo think I am spamming myself and send it off to bulk?

I like Lavabit (www.lavabit.com), which recently (finally !) added webmail access to its privacy-concious and reliable service. (The webmail interface is very simple and only temporary, until they complete their more customized one.)

I also have been looking at a service called Woomail. (www.woomail.com) Interesting setup. It's free... so far. I don't know how long it will stay that way.

Also, a lot of people like fastmail (www.fastmail.com)

Oops ! Should be www.fastmail.fm

I set up a Yahoo account last summer and haven't used it since. In fact never actually used it. Just saw this and decided to check and sure enough its still there. Sandy

albert 135-
Inactivity does not refer to email coming to an address. Inactivity means you are not logging in often enough. You could get 1000 legitimate emails a day, but the account would get closed if you didn't login as often as the provider specifies. So sending copies from another account to, say, your Yahoo! account will do nothing to keep the latter account open.

In fairness since I promoted Hotmail on this thread, the site has been having concerns the last few days. This is unusual and I can only remember it happening previously when they were changing technologies or standards.

DA

Hotmail has been the one I've used for years and 99.999% of the time there has been no problems.

Sue

Yesterday was the first time in 9 months that I logged into that Yahoo acct. Maybe they don't inactivate them anymore? Sandy

Yahoo if you have anything Yahoo that you use your yahoo name for won't expire the email account, even if you really really want to get rid of it.

I use yahoo for search , and every day yahoo says good morning mike, or hello or something similar across the top if each page. If you are not you, please log off.

If the user will only use it rarely, then go with Yahoo, since hotmail locks you out after 2 months if you haven't logged in.

Wow,

I knew this was the place to get answers! Thank you all so much.

So the choices are: Gmail (that's a Google thing, right?), Yahoo, Hotmail, Lavabit and Woomail. I'm not ignoring the fastmail.fm one, but I think having the .fm suffix will be a problem for this un-computer-savvy person.

I'll check them all out.

Thanks again!

Molly~

I have two friends who use Hotmail, and everything I have sent to them for the past two days using my default e-mail account has come back as spam. This has not happened with anyone else. I just tried using my gmail account to send to these same two people, and so far nothing has come back (keeping my fingers crossed).

As I reported Hotmail has had internal concerns the last few days.

DA

Hi, Molly

You said, "I'm not ignoring the fastmail.fm one, but I think having the .fm suffix will be a problem for this un-computer-savvy person."

I don't use Fastmail myself, but many do and like it a lot. (It's based in Australia, I believe, as is bluebottle.com.) Anyway, Fastmail actually is known for having loads of other domains that you can use when you sign up for an account. Check out point #3 at the following site:

http://fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/General.htm#OtherDomains

I think "cluemail.com" is one of the more popular of Fastmail's alternatives.

Just fyi. :-)

Scott