Email Ergo Sum

If you do not have email access, check out these services. As a general rule, free email accounts are advertising supported.

• If you have web access through someone elses account, work, school, an anonymous account, a public access terminal, or similar means but need your own mailbox to receive mail, check out usa.net.
• If you do not have internet access at all, or want to send and receive email from somewhere you don't have access, consider juno.com. This is a free advertising supported offline email-only system but you have to use their proprietary (windoze only) software. No web browsing, or anything resembling real internet access but they have local dialups in many areas. This system is able to provide free dialup access via over 400 local telephone numbers because the phone calls are brief, only to upload and download email messages and download new advertisements.
• hotmail.com offers email via web page access. Unfortunately, they do not provide a mechanism to forward your mail to your new account when you get a real account somewhere later; this is a serious drawback. You also cannot send mail from hotmail to here, because of some network problem that causes the packets to get mangled before they reach us.
• pobox.comis not free but provides one of the oldest commercial mail forwarding services. You may wish to use pobox in conjuction with a service like hotmail.
• Yahoo lists various types of Internet Service Providers including Email Providers
• There is a side by side comparision of free email services. Unfortunately, due to poor web page design, it is very hard to read. The page is on geocities web server and may be biased.

Some questions to ask prospective Email Providers

• Do they provide dialup access? If so, is it email only or full internet access?
• Do they provide access to your mail via web pages (i.e. via html, not POP or IMAP)?
• Do they provide access to your mailbox via the POP protocol?
• Do they provide access to your mailbox(es) via the IMAP protocol? IMAP is far superior to POP.
• How much email will they store, and for how long? How do you archive your mail after that?
• Do they store messages on their server so you can access your incoming mailboxes and saved message folders from anywhere you have web access? If you travel (prehaps only between school/work and home) and don't have your own servers, you may want a service which stores all your mail online at their server location.
• Do they allow you to save all outgoing mail?
• Can they forward email to another email address while you are using them as your primary email service?
• Can they forward email to another email address when you switch to another primary email provider.
• Do they provide finger service? What control can you excercise over information provided by finger?
• Can they collect messages from other email providers? Via POP? Via IMAP?
• Can they provide filtering?
• Can they provide multiple inboxes through the same account?
• Do they charge money for basic services? For extended services?
• Do they embed advertisements in your email? When viewed through a web browser? When forwarded? When retreived by POP or IMAP?
• Do they embed advertisements in your outgoing email?
• Can you organize your mail into folders?
• What measures do they take to help protect your mailbox from spam?
• What measures do they take to prevent people from using their service from sending spam? You do not want to support any service provider who is negligent; not only is it unethical, it is also entirely likely that if they do not take adequate measures to prevent spammers sending from their site that the entire site, including you, could be blocked from sending email to large portions of the internet.
• Do they provide web page space? Is it in the cannonical location? I.E., if your address "is yourusername@domain.com" then your cannonical email address is "http://domain.com/~yourusername/"; some common substitutes are "http://www.domain.com/~yourusername/" and "http://www.domain.com/yourusername/".
• Do they provide web page redirects? I.E., if people try your canonical web page address (based on your email address), can the service redirect visitors to your real off site web page location?
• If they provide web pages, do they allow you full control over your web page content? I.E. can you put any valid html code in there? Do they embed advertising in your web page or require you to include advertising there? Do they censor web page content in any way? How?
• Do they provide encrypted access to your mail account (i.e. SSL)?
• Do they provide a way for you to send and receive encrypted email? Do they support the leading defacto standard PGP? How about PEM? S/MIME?
• Do they engage in any unethical methods of advertising such as usenet or email spamming?
• Do you need any proprietary software to use their service?