Free POP Email Account Options

Over the weekend I finally hit the breaking point with my email provider. I have a lot of patience with spam I receive, but that patience quickly wears thin when my ISP gets classified as a spammer by third-party anti-spam services. That was the last straw, and after counting up the cash I was paying for a dial-up account I hadn't used in years (which was the origin of that email address in 1997), it was pretty clear it was time to go.

But go where? Free web email is easy to find online, but I'm a die-hard Outlook user, and that means an IMAP or POP account that Outlook can download mail from. So...where to get one of those?

Turns out there are numerous free POP account options online. To wit, I found this page, which has nearly a dozen free POP servers and a handful of free IMAP servers, too. I almost signed up for one, but then I got to thinking: Did I really want to trust my email (the blood of my business and my life) to a free service with a name like "Cwazy Mail"? Some of these services offer a scant 10MB of storage and a limit of 500KB per email. For my heavy-duty needs, this just wasn't going to cut it.

After thinking about it for some time, I actually ended up upgrading my Yahoo! Mail account to Yahoo! Mail Plus. (Sadly, I realize this makes me sound like a corporate shill for Yahoo!, but there's some good reasoning behind it, so hear me out.) At $20 a year, it's very reasonably priced (Runbox is $50 a year), messages can be up to 20MB in size, and you get 2GB of storage before mail starts to bounce. The anti-spam filter works pretty well, and there's no promotional messages at the bottom of my email, either. Of course, I already had a regular Yahoo! Mail account so moving to it wouldn't be completely painful.

Now I'm thigh-deep in the agonizing process of letting the world know I've moved email addresses, which is reminiscent of the pain I experienced moving physical addresses earlier this year. I've never really glommed on to services like Plaxo, which are designed to make moves like this easier. But I wonder if there's a better way aside from spamming the 978 contacts in my address book and replying individually to the thousands of people who email me that aren't in the address book? I doubt it, but I'd love to hear any ideas from the crowd.