I happened to know Fastmail.fm quite by chance. It really stands upto its name. Even on the ever-so-slow dialup connection at home it takes less than 2 seconds to load. Compare that to almost 30 seconds for Yahoo and 20 seconds for Hotmail. The free account gives you a healthy 10MB mailbox.
The site offers some good facilities like 50 domains to choose from, aliasing, personality creation, POP retrieval from other accounts, mail forwarding, IMAP access, vacation response, etc.
No heavy-duty ads are featured here. Just a good, clean mailbox. They also provide a bounce feature which can be pretty helpful in giving those spammers and Nigerian conmen, a taste of their own medicine.
The entire user interface is customizable. You can choose your own themes, no. of rows to display, etc. You can even setup automatic retrieval of your POP accounts every few hours. You can choose your email address from over 50 domains.
All these make emailing, an experience to look forward to.