Yahoo! Mail - Free Email Service

Space, with Yahoo! Mail, is no issue: you can accumulate as much email as "unlimited" storage will hold.

Of course, you'll want to organize all that mail. Yahoo! Mail offers folders (to which you can drag and drop messages) to hold and decent search (you can use a number of operators to specify senders or dates, for example, and have contacts completed for you) to find mail. All folders let you focus on mail from people you've befriended via Yahoo! profile connections easily — and their emails appear on the "Welcome" page, too.

Unfortunately, search categories cannot be saved as smart folders — Yahoo! Mail does come with filters that automatically file incoming mail, though — and you cannot freely apply multiple labels to messages. You have to put emails into multiple folders for that kind of organization.

Speaking of filters and folders, Yahoo! Mail comes with solid but, alas, not stellar spam control. It could do better in that area. Of course, Yahoo! Mail scans for viruses and will protect you from web-bugs in unknown senders' messages.

While Yahoo! Mail Plus comes with a few goodies such as POP access and larger messages, IMAP access is missing from all but mobile devices. Instead of reaching out to email programs, Yahoo! Mail integrates instant messaging (Yahoo!, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger) and SMS messages as well as certain social networks. You can read updates from Yahoo! and Facebook contacts as well as Twitter, for example, and share your thoughts with these networks, too, right from Yahoo! Mail.

On mobile devices, Yahoo! Mail offers a rich web-based application that allows for full archive and some offline search, for example. iPhone and Android devices get native applications with these features, contact integration, support for attachments, and more.

In day-to-day use, it is the details that make one love or loathe an email service, of course. Yahoo! Mail not only brings a sleek interface and tabs and drag-and-drop oomph but also keyboard shortcuts around every (round) corner and well-thought-out solutions to many a practical problem (such as addressing messages).

(Updated December 2012)