Remember when I talked about mailinator and explained how it helped reduce spam? Well, a free email service is yet another way to reduce the flood of email to your inbox.

The major companies that offer free email are typically very stable. You can expect that your email address will be at least semi-permanent. I’ve had one free email address for about (well, this is a wild guess) eight or nine years now. And I expect that I’ll have it for a lot longer.

With a free email account (or two or three) you don’t have to worry about signing up for anything. Fill out forms online, enter sweepstakes, fill out applications . . . you can sign up for anything with no fear of receiving bucketloads of spam in your main inbox. Obviously, you’ll still get lots of spam (in your free email account), but most of the free email services also have excellent spam filters built into them. But the point is, your personal email box will always stay spam-free because only the people you communicate regularly need have your email address. Your free, junk email address handles all the spam and crapmail (hey, a new word).

Some of the reputable email services I’ve tried and enjoyed:

• Yahoo!
  Good spam filtering and virus protection
  Attachments up to 10MB
  Built in chat (with other Yahoo! members)
  Unlimited space for storage (unlimited? really?)
  Can integrate it with Windows Live Messenger
  Good search capabilities
  No POP3, IMAP, or SMTP support (what this means is that you can’t use your email client, e.g., Outlook, Thunderbird, etc., to check or send your email)
  Lots of big ads all over the place (not an issue of you’re using Firefox with Adblock Plus)
• Gmail
  Excellent spam filtering and virus protection
  Attachments up to 20MB
  Built in chat (with other Gmail members)
  Over 6 gigabytes of space and counting
  Google’s own search capabilities (and the ability to add labels, stars, filters, etc.)
  POP3, IMAP, SMTP support (check & send email using your email client)
  Small, relevant (at least they try to be) text ads that are much less intrusive than the ads served with Yahoo! Mail
• Windows Live Hotmail (formerly just Hotmail)
  Good spam filtering / virus protection
  Attachments up to 10MB
  Windows Live Messenger Integration
  5 gigabytes of storage
  No POP3 or IMAP support
  Nice search capabilities
  Lots of big ads (like Yahoo!)
  Complicated interface (created to look similar to Outlook)

My favorite of these is Gmail, hands-down. It’s got the simplest interface and the most features.

If you have already tried any of these, which is YOUR favorite?