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Free IMAP, POP3 Email Mailboxes, Web Email, Email Forwarding or
Redirection
These free services give you a free email address with either a POP3 mailbox
access, IMAP access, web email access, or email aliases that will forward or
redirect email sent to that address to another. They may be used by people who
are looking for an email address that is independent of their ISP, and thus
hopefully more permanent that that given by the ISP.
Note that many of the free services block email messages from many sources
including legitimate sources like Yahoo! Groups and other email newsletter
sources that you may have subscribed to (ie, you deliberately elected to receive
those newsletters) with no facility for you to override this. Since so many free
providers do this, I no longer bother to mention this for each of the individual
free email service entries listed below.
If you need more facilities for your email (eg spam protection, virus
protection, more space to store your email, etc), you might want to consider
using a commercial service like Fastmail.fm (also listed below
because they provide a free option with limited options).
Disclaimer
The information provided on this page comes without any warranty whatsoever.
Use it at your own risk. Just because a program, book or service is listed here
or has a good review does not mean that I endorse or approve of the program or
of any of its contents. All the other standard disclaimers also apply.
Free Web Email
- Fastmail.fm
-
This is probably one of the best services around. They are essentially a
commercial email service with a free option which provides a limited subset of
their services. They provide you with a mailbox that you can access via the web
(both encrypted and normal access), IMAP, IMAP+SSL (ie, with encrypted access),
POP3 (paid services only), POP3+SSL (encrypted access, paid services only),
email filters, spam filters (using SpamAssassin, paid services only), virus
checking (paid services only), collection of your mail from other POP3 email
boxes as well as Hotmail, multiple personalities where you can appear to send
from any email address (paid accounts only), email aliases (paid accounts),
email forwarding, etc. There are no advertisements, and their pages are
extremely fast loading.
- OperaMail
-
There doesn't seem to be much information about this email service, except
that it is free, and it does not restrict the number of messages you send or
receive (unless you spam). You also need to opt to receive their advertisements.
- Yahoo
-
This service comes with folders to organise your email, filter them, attach
files, automatically respond to mails received (autoresponder), and so on. You
have up to 4MB of space to store your email. Note though, if you don't access
your email in two weeks, your account will be deleted. There appears to be a
secure login facility, although (if I'm to judge by other Yahoo services) I
suspect that only the login takes place under SSL; the rest of the session uses
unencrypted transfers.
- Hotmail
-
This rather popular web email service, now run by Microsoft, gives you 2MB
for your mail boxes. There are other limitations on your account as well. You
will need to log into Microsoft Passport to use them, so if you have privacy
concerns about Passport, this is not a service that you'll want to use.
- Wowmail
-
This web based email service looks relatively new. They currently do not have
a fully featured address book (with the ability to add and delete email
addresses at will) nor a way to save sent messages nor folders to organise your
email, nor filtering, but their FAQ says that these will be implemented in the
future. They do, however, allow attachments.
- Mail.com
-
This service provides you the ability to block email addresses, create
folders to organize your mail, and send/receive attachments. It issues a pop-up
window when you reach their site, another pop-up window each time you delete a
message (if you block their pop-up, you will not be able to delete your
messages) and at least two pop-up windows when you log out. I'm not sure if
there are other pop-up windows as well; I winded up blocking all pop-ups except
when I delete mail. Frankly, I wouldn't recommend them because of the numerous
pop-ups that you'll have to face; one pop-up is fine (after all they need the
ads to survive), but this is ridiculous. (Tip: if you're interested, either the
free Opera
web browser or the Mozilla browser
(also free) will allow you to switch off pop-ups. Opera allows you to switch
them off and on easily - hit F12 and select "Allow pop-ups..." or "Refuse
pop-ups". In Mozilla, just do it in the Preferences.)
Free POP3 or IMAP Email Mailboxes
- Fastmail.fm
-
This is probably one of the best services around. They are essentially a
commercial email service with a free option which provides a limited subset of
their services. They provide you with a mailbox that you can access via the web
(both encrypted and normal access), IMAP, IMAP+SSL (ie, with encrypted access),
POP3 (paid services only), POP3+SSL (encrypted access, paid services only),
email filters, spam filters (using SpamAssassin, paid services only), virus
checking (paid services only), collection of your mail from other POP3 email
boxes as well as Hotmail, multiple personalities where you can appear to send
from any email address (paid accounts only), email aliases (paid accounts),
email forwarding, etc. There are no advertisements, and their pages are
extremely fast loading.
- MyRealBox
-
MyRealBox is run by Novell. It provides you with 10MB of space for your mail,
which you can access through a web interface or via POP3 (with SSL). They also
have a secure login. There are no advertisements, but since MyRealBox is
actually Novell's test bed for their email software, you are actually their
guinea pig. This is generally fine except that there are occasional (long)
periods when you can't access your mail or their site; this occurs when they're
installing a new version to test it or to debug a new feature.
- GMX Free POP3 MailBox
-
GMX provides you with a free POP3 mailbox to receive your mail. You have to
retrieve your mail using an email client that can handle POP3. They will send
you advertisements in your mailbox from time to time to defray their costs. You
can also access your email via a web interface. Note that their site is in
German - so unless you know German, you will have a hard time navigating their
interface.
- Hotpop Free POP3 MailBox
-
Hotpop provides you with a free POP3 mailbox (10MB of space), free SMTP
access, mail forwarding, server-side spam filtering, a variety of domains to
choose from, in exchange for your agreement to receive their advertisements in
that POP mail box. Your message is limited to 500KB in size (so no large
attachments can be used), and you are allowed to receive up to 1,000 messages
and to send up to 500 messages a month.
Free Email Forwarding
- Bigfoot
-
Bigfoot allows you to choose an email address like yourname@bigfoot.com which
it will redirect to an email address of your choosing. Unfortunately they have
scaled their free services down substantially so that they only allow you to
receive a limit of 25 email messages a day. You are required to sign up to
receive their advertisements by email.
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