In case you don't already know, these companies make money with advertising. The bottom of all the emails you send out will have advertisements attached. Of course, not to the point that you would get rid of the email account. Other free email offerings will spam your mailbox with their daily sales and newsletters. Also another form of advertisement. Today I'm going to go over 3 of the biggest email companies at the moment.

Microsoft Hotmail a.k.a. MSN - Hotmail was originally one of the most popular email domains. So popular in fact, that at the beginning many new computer users assumed that the only way to get an email account was from hotmail. Today, MSN has evolved to an annoying and cluttered email design. To begin with, their email accounts demand you log into your account at least once every month or else you risk losing your account. This is hardly the way to treat those that go on vacation and come home eager to read their emails! Logging into MSN mail is an unattractive blue design that makes it hard to find the MAIL or "inbox" button. The opening page has obnoxious advertisement on all along the left side and an a big one on the right. MSN insists on spending as much as 1/3rd to HALF of your email-reading screen to put their advertisements. The design makes it hard for you to click on the tiny buttons and links for you to navigate around your folders. The white text on dark blue background just doesn't work for me and I think many feel the same. MSN also only gives a 250mb limit for their free email users and will automatically empty your junk box every 5 days. MSN will also empty many of your folders after 30 days. Again, very aggressive space-saving rules. 

The only nice thing about MSN that I could find is that your emails are paged and you can select which page to jump to, without having to click next 15-20 times.

So lets sum it all up: Small mailbox size compared to yahoo, ugly & hard-to-navigate design, aggressive rules for keeping your account and email, aggressive advertisements overpowering your email navigation buttons.

The only thing good about msn is a short easy to spell domain name like This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and paged emails.

Otherwise, MSN free email is a total failure in comparison to other free email accounts.

Yahoo Mail - Another popular giant in the free email world. In sharp contrast with MSN, we have here and very attractive and easy to use email design. The opening page starts off at the mail page and the ads are not overpowering the page. The text and background colors make for a very easy-to-read contrast. The mailbox size is a whopping 1 giga-byte!!! Being as hardcore of a computer user that I am, I don't think my mailbox has ever gone over 10%. There really isn't anything to hate about Yahoo that you couldn't say about other companies. Which is why I've been using Yahoo for years and years and years now. Again, having a name like yahoo makes life so much easier. You will never have someone over the phone asking you to re-spell the domain again.

Google Gmail - This new giant just appeared on the scene on a little while ago. It sports a VERY VERY CLEAN design. Very little ads if at all. In fact, there are none at the moment. The email is very fast and searchable. You can import your contacts from Yahoo Mail, Outlook, or Hotmail. Gmail is very easy to use, clean, un-cluttered and best of all it features FREE POP3 ACCESS. That's right you can download your emails to Outlook and work with the many features of Outlook. Gmail also sports the largest mailbox limit of 2736mb which equals 2.7gb! of space. More than some people's computer hard drive usage! Another big advantage to GMAIL is the speed. The clean, plain simple template loads quickly and the response time is so high. Yahoo and MSN's pageflipping takes forever. The new Yahoo which allows you to scroll through all your emails in one single folder takes forever to load.

And so we have the winner........GMAIL!! Cleanest, most un-cluttered design, largest space usage, free POP3 access, and speedy searchable email. Which a size limit like theirs, you'll never have to delete anything again!

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