META: With the number of free email services out there all offering something slightly different, it’s up to you to select the right one that will be good for you.

With competition tough out there and a plethora of free email servies available, providers are trying to include better features all the time in order to give the user a better service. You will be surprised at the amount that you can get for free from a prompt interface, mail filter facilities and many other useful features at no added cost. You may even be tempted to have more than one free email account that you could assign to various categories of mails that you receive.

Some of the top ten email service providers include –

Gmail from Google, which offers almost unlimited storage and an efficient interface that allows you to check your mails effortlessly. Accessing gmail from any kind of email programme is feasible assuming you have POP and IMAP software. When you are reading or sending an email, the advertisements can be seen without the emails causing a hindrance.

Yahoo Mail also offers unlimited storage besides which it provides RSS news feeds and instant messaging. Yahoo also has another service known as the Yahoo Mail Classic, which offers a fairly good Spam protection feature while a rich HTML editor is also available for writing emails.

AIM Mail from AOL offers its free services with limitless storage, a brilliant interface and an excellent Spam protection. Features such as smart folders and labels are sadly not offered but it does offer standard POP and IMAP access.

FastMail offers some good things and some of which are not so good, so let’s begin with the good things; an astral web interface, IMAP access and some other useful features. The down side of this service, it offers limited storage of 2GB and not a very good spam filter.

GMX Mail is another consistent free email service that offers a rich interface along with POP and IMAP access, a good Spam filter, protection against viruses and a 5GB of storage. But proper organizing of mails is a bit lacking here.

Inbox.com provides its clients 5GB of online storage and an efficient web mail access along with POP for your email programme. However, improvement for use of organising mails is really required and it does not support IMAP accessibility.

A user-friendly interface, total security and 5GB of storage is offered free with Windows Live Hotmail email services. On the down side getting mail to go past the folder level is non-existant and it does not give you POP and IMAP access. The available Spam filter could also use some improvement.

A good spam filter, organising your mail with labels along with several short cuts are all features that are offered by Zenbe Personal. They only however, offer IMAP access for the inbox.

Zapak Mail is a free email service that offers unlimited storage, POP access and a few background images besides which it is not such an efficient mail service.

Gawab.com is a fast and reliable free email service that offers its users 10GB of online storage along with POP and IMAP access. Labels, nor complete mail search facility are however offered.

If you are new to the Internet and do not know which email service providers are good as well as reliable, this list of free email service providers would help you select one for your free email account. You could choose to have one or more free email accounts as suits your requirement. They will also provide you with a free email address.