Okay the service is free (at least one level is-if you want the one with that ad of the dog biting the bear). Here’s the problem. It has 3 Mb of storage space, trash included. You are forever having to empty the trash or you immediately exceed your quota.
If you give these guys $30 a year, you get (brace yourself) 25 MB of storage and POP so you can use Thunderbird or (if you like pain) the comparable Microsoft product. Now lets do a little comparison. If you go to Google, you get something like 7 Gb (280 x the storage of the paid account and 2, 000 x the memory of the free one). Much less obtrusive ads. And you get both POP and IMAP (which with 7 GB, you can leave stuff on the server and sync with multiple computers and other devices like blackberries). Oh and Gmail is free. I guess my rant is what world are these guys living in where 25 Mb, let alone 3, is a acceptable amount of storage, especially for a paid email account.
Aside from that rant, it’s pretty reliable and if you remember to empty your trash and don’t get too many or too big emails, it will probably work fine.