Are free email services worth it?

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Just my comments and opinions: I have a yahoo.com email address and have used it for years. Some really good things about it:

Hard drives die but yahoo email servers are backed up (I assume!). I feel my email is safer on yahoo than on my local computer in an outlook .pst file.

It has a web interface so I can access it from any computer with internet access.

It was recently expanded to 100 megs of storage, which feels like a whole lot to me!

The vast majority of the 100-200 spams I get each day are filtered into my bulk mail (spam) folder for easy deletion. Only a few non-spam messages end up in there (though I sure wish it was none at all. As it is I have to look through it every day to be sure I'm not deleting good stuff).

Definitely no customer service, automatic forwarding, etc though!

Your statement: "SPAM - free email services seem to receive a disproportionate amount of spam" would indicate it is a while since you last used a free email account. Yahoo and Hotmail introduced excellent spam filtering processes about twelve months or more agp. Where once they were a spammer's "magnet", I now receive less than ten per week and I have several accounts. Prior to the introduction of that filtering, I was receiving 52% of my messages as spam (calculated by Mailwasher PRO). Gmail, introduced its service late last year, and again they have excellent spam filtering. The service in my address - Privatemail.me.uk - is another I have never received spam through. So if you haven't looked at web mail it's worth a revisit.

Is anyone out there getting the same problem as I am? I keep getting pop-up boxes that say Match The Picture, when I put in the password for my Hotmail account. I havn't had access for a couple of days. Even my tech says he's not heard this before (although he hasn't been able to come to look at it as yet). He said he knows about the boxes - but normally when you decipher the 'code characters' - you get in. Does anyone know how to get around this problem or even where it originates? I've changed my password - it doesn't help. Intriguing to say the least. I emailed you yesterday but haven't yet had a response.

Yes. It's apparently happening to a number of people.

Even more weird, other people's messages show up in my sent file and then the respondent's messages come to me. This only happens when the sender uses a public computer network that I used years ago. This happens about once a week.

i want to ask a ques in the service to the provider of gamil but i dont know how to conatact them.

my problem is " some of my friends got the 50 invitations.. so they can invite their friends to open the gmail service but i am not able t get the invitations how can i get that. please reply me and send the ans via mail to me

As stated in the article, free email accounts have no customer support.

GMail is still in Beta. Whether you get invitations to hand out is fairly random and not under your control. Simply be patient.

I lost password for this e-mail [Email Address Removed]
Please help me!

Even though this article talks about Hotmail, it applies to Yahoo as well: http://ask-leo.com/ive_lost_my_hotmail_password_can_you_help_get_it_back.html

hi my name is fadi , and someone hacked my email.. [Email Address Removed] and changed the secret question and answer... this email is very important to me and i have everything from school-to-work papers and eveything... plz help me and reply me to this email. [Email Address Removed] in openning [Email Address Removed] and hope as soon as possible to hear from u guyz

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