All listed free email providers offer as a minimum free POP3 and SMTP services which means you can receive and send email with your favorite email software (like Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Email and many others).
Note: Times are changing! When we created this in list in 1999 we intended to help users to select the BEST service from hundreds of good and FREE email providers. Meanwhile most free email services have stopped operating or started charging a fee even for their most basic email accounts. As our users tell us, this has made this list more important than ever: We list the few remaining email providers that offer at least a basic FREE POP/SMTP account.
In order to provide you with the best possible selection of free email accounts, we no longer restrict our selection to providers with an English user interface. In fact, our current No. 2(3) free email service is GMX, a German company. They provide an excellent free email account once you struggled through their German registration dialogs.
For more information visit http://www.iopus.com/guides/bestpopsmtp.htm
| TOP | Name | Description |
| 1 | GMail http://gmail.google.com | GMail offers POP/SMTP/IMAP access to its email and is extremely fast and reliable. Also Gmail offers the best Anti-Spam filter of all tested solutions. Tip1: The free Mozilla Thunderbird email client includes built-in support for Gmail, this makes setting up an account very easy. Tip 2: You have your own email server? Then use GMail as hosted SPAM Filter. Here are the settings: POP server: pop.gmail.com, Port: 995 (SSL) SMTP: smtp.gmail.com, Port: 465 (SSL) User name: your Gmail email address. Google GMail setup tutorials |
| 2 | No second place | Gmail is so much better than any of the other free email services we tested that we decided the leave the second place empty to visually show the gap between Gmail and the other winners. |
| 3 | GMX http://www.gmx.com | GMX is a very good and RELIABLE email provider. Since GMX is the biggest provider of free email in Germany it is for sure here to stay. Note: Unfortunately GMX discontinued their English language service lately. They now only maintain the German user interface. Tip: You can use a free Online translation services or a dictionary for help with the German sign-up form. We think that GMX is so good, it is worth the sign-up trouble! Recent change as of November 2007: John from UK reports: Hi, I just wanted to let you know, EU members can now once again sign up for GNX using their own choice of password and user name, simply by going to http://www.gmx.com and the system should automatically detect where you are located and offer the correct page. POP3: pop.gmx.net SMTP: mail.gmx.net |
| 4 | HotPoP http://www.HotPOP.com | Easy setup and works ok - and that is more than you can expect with most free email services. Note that the free account has a 500 KB size limit for email messages. POP3: pop.hotpop.com, SMTP: mail.hotpop.com |
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