By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 23, 2002; Page H07
A couple of years ago, I scooped up about a dozen extra e-mail addresses, thanks to the proliferation of Web sites that figured giving users free e-mail accounts was the way to draw in advertisers' dollars.
Today, nearly all of those e-mail addresses are gone. Just this month, one of my old favorites, an Australian site called Start, stopped.
The universe of Web-mail sites remains vast; Andrew Goodman, an editor at Traffick.com, a guide to Web portals and search engines, figures that there are still "in the thousands to tens of thousands" of free e-mail services on the Web. But people seem to be gravitating toward the biggest, presumably safest, choices, something Goodman sees in his own inbox -- where most of the Web-mail messages come from Hotmail or Yahoo accounts.
According to the research firm ComScore Media Metrix, Microsoft's Hotmail site (www.hotmail.com) drew about 40 million users in the United States last month and Yahoo (mail.yahoo.com) had about 30 million. The next contender, Netscape's Web-mail offering (webmail.netscape.com), had about 2 million users.
This popularity has yet to be affected by Hotmail and Yahoo's recent cutbacks in their free services. Both sites have been slowly peeling away free features, merging them into extra-cost premium service options. Starting July 16, for example, Hotmail users will no longer be able to check other mail accounts from the site unless they pay a $19.95 yearly fee. In March, Yahoo began charging for the ability to read Yahoo mail with standard e-mail software.
So far surfers aren't lining up to pay for these once-free features -- that is, if they used them at all. Hotmail claims more than 110 million active users worldwide, but only 300,000 customers have signed on for any Hotmail or MSN extra-service options.
If you're torn between the big two, Hotmail's recent service cutbacks give Yahoo the edge in a few important categories.
With Yahoo, for example, you get 4 megabytes of inbox capacity for your e-mail, or 6 megs if you signed up with Yahoo before it shrank that allotment last year. With Hotmail, you get 2. People can send attached files as large as 1.5 megs from a Yahoo account, compared with half a meg for Hotmail users. With a Hotmail account, users have to log in every 30 days or the account is shut down; Yahoo mail account users get four months.
The same goes for both services' for-pay upgrades -- with Hotmail, you can upgrade to a 10-meg mailbox for $19.99 per year, a fee that also lets users send larger attached files and fetch e-mail from regular Internet mail accounts. To upgrade a Yahoo account to 10 megs of storage will only run you $9.99 a year.
At some lesser-known Web-mail services, meanwhile, you can still get those sorts of extras for free. Mail.com, for example, gives users numerous addresses to choose from (options such as "@mindless.com" or "@earthling.net") and a 10-meg inbox.
A little comparison shopping can pay off even if you're not paying anything. The risk is that a smaller, more obscure service might eventually go belly up. Is that something to worry about?
If you want to use a Web-mail account as your primary inbox, you'd better choose carefully, and you might be best with a name-brand site, be it Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape or similarly well-established options such as Lycos or Apple's new Mac.com. But if your Web-mail account will only be a backup to your regular account -- or you're only looking for an address to give out for software or Web-site registrations -- virtually any Web-mail option will do.
In that case, you can get creative. Directories of free-mail sites (see, for instance, www.emailaddresses.com and www.fepg.net) offer any number of wacky e-mail addresses, yours with a few mouse clicks. You might want to think twice about sending your next résumé from a "marijuana.com" address, however.
