Email providers

The big three, Hotmail, Yahoo, and G-mail all three are free, and have decent mailbox size.hotmail and yahoo can be saved to your hard drive by using Outlook, or windows live mail. Not sure if you can export your juno messages or not, worse case scenero is to forward then to your new e-mail account.

I use Yahoo, its been good but I had to pay for an upgrade to the service to utilize MS Outlook. Don't know about the others, but do you trust Google? Heck, I'm not sure what Yahoo is doing either for that matter. I also have Yahoo as a host for my website. Good Luck with your choice.

I've been a Hotmail user since 1997 and still use it as my primary account.

Also, I set up a "bullshit" account on yahoo for various online transaction accounts. Consider setting one up for anything where you have to enter an e-mail address to get online (with some exceptions).

Anything where I know they'll use my e-mail address to blast me with non-stop advertising goes to the bullshit account. Amazon purchases, newsletter sign-ups, club memberships...all to the yahoo account. Personal e-mails, important stuff that outweighs whatever additional e-mails you might get (i.e. utility bills, plane reservations, etc.) go to the personal account. Saves me a lot of deletion time. I check my personal account every day--yahoo account every 3-4 days, mainly just to clear it out in bulk.

Both seem to do a pretty good job at filtering out spam, but still be careful.

i love gmail

Gmail uses SSL and hides your IP address from the message source.

i am a luddite of sorts odnation...

what are practical effects of those two things?

I have used Yahoo! since it debuted (95?) and have always liked it. I also use GMail for mail and calendar since I have an Android phone. I imagine I'll eventually migrate everything to GMail.

I never paid for any upgrade and I use Outlook with my e-mail account. I like Outlook a lot.

May be a dumb question, but are you looking for a new ISP AND e-mail, or just e-mail?

Gmail uses SSL and hides your IP address from the message source.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a commonly-used protocol for managing the security of a message transmission on the Internet. SSL has recently been succeeded by Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is based on SSL

Et cetera, ad nauseum. JR is able to do a better job of explaining this than I could. Essentially, whenever you connect to the Internet you're assigned a number. It is possible that the gmail system hides that number from prying eyes.

The real concerns when dealing with email are:
Never put anything in an email message that you are not prepared to shout in a crowded room in front of your friends, family, government, government agencies and mortal, unstable enemies.
If you have anything you want kept confidential and you feel you must email this thing, use some decent public key encryption and know, for a certain fact, that your message will draw the attention of the NSA, and that the NSA very likely has a back door to your public key encryption system.
If you're shy about your email, find and use an anonymous remailer. EFF can probably point you to a few.

Good luck to you.

Gmail

I have all of my domain emails forwarded to my gmail account...

Definitely set up a BS account as oldhome recommended.

If I were starting over, I would even get a third account just for relatives, called something like TheViolaFamily and I would only give that out to family. Reason being, as aging relatives slowly get online, they all discover the same, predictable sequences of cute kitten photos and urban myths that every secretary already forwarded to me from about 1985 onwards. It's also good for the extended family who believe that forwarding political and religious stuff without any personal comment is a valid way to stay in touch. All of that should accumulate in a place where it won't disturb my daily operations.

I'm partial to gmail. Was a beta tester and have the same account since then, which is nice. Have email going back to my college days :) Plus it's flexible. You can use the web interface or pop3 access for your smart phone or email client of choice.

One of the biggest benefits is shared spam filtering. It's very rare something slips through the cracks into my inbox.

Plus I like the fact it's stable. You can move, change ISP's and jobs so it's nice to have an email account you can always use no matter life changes.