Free Email Providers

If you don't want the one you ISP gives you, or you want an alternative email address there are a ton of free email providers online. These can come in handy for keeping email from your website separate from your personal mail, cutting down on spam and many other reasons.

Since there are thousands of free email providers out there, I'm only listing the ones that I feel stand out from the crowd.

Care2 Email
Care2 offers a wide variety of free services and their main goal is to make the planet a better place for people and the environment. Their web based email gives 100mb storage, 10mb attachment limit, auto-replies, spell check (currently in 12 languages), spam and virus filters and lets you get access to any of your POP3 accounts. You also get a funky address that lets people know a bit about what you stand for. Current addresses available are: you@care2.com, you@wildmail.com, you@peacemail.com, you@animail.net, you@whalemail.com and you@vegemail.com.

Hush Mail
Web base, totally secure and private email. I'd suggest using this for any really important messages. The "Email is encrypted, scanned for viruses and filtered for spam, automatically." They also offer secure instant messaging as well.

Yahoo Mail
Out of the major web based email services this is one of the ones I prefer lately. It's not as packed with ads as some other providers, the junk mail filters are working great (with very few false positives) and I have to admit.. I like the avatars :)

Thunderbird Mail Program
This is the mail program I use on my home computer to gather POP 3 email from all my websites. (It also supports IMAP) It's super easy to use, can have multiple accounts, offers built in RSS reader, government grade security, anti-phishing protection, junk mail filters and is extremely customizable! There are themes to change the way it looks totally and extensions to add even more features. And.. everything is totally free!

mailto Encoder
While it isn't an email provider, this is a service I use and recommend. Just type in your current email address and it returns it encoded, so that email extractors, search engine spiders and any spam bots can't read but works perfectly on your website!

Offer Free Email on Your Site

Want to be like one of the big sites that gives away free email? Well you can no matter what size of site you own! The email services below allow you to offer free email directly from your web site! They maintain the accounts in exchange for advertising revenue. You get to give your visitors a great reason to come back. Both offer branding with your logo and a great chance to advertise your website!

Zap Zone Network
For smaller sites ZZN offers a similar service as Everyone.net but without the traffic requirements. Your visitors can still sign up for and login to your email directly from your website, or if you prefer at www.yourdomain.zzn.com. It's brandable with your sites logo and colors, is available in 14 languages and (here's a big one!) you can promote your site by adding a tag line to each outgoing message! ZZN has also been around for years and is showing no signs of slowing up. Your visitors email addresses would look like theirname@yourdomain.zzn.com.