Hotmail, Yahoo! e-mail, Gmail, AIM mail - these are all free e-mail services, but are they worth the price you pay? Sure, free e-mail services such as Hotmail, being Web-based, allow you to access your e-mail from virtually anywhere in the world, but other Web-based e-mail services do that, as well.

The downsides to free e-mail services are legion, and many well-documented. Hotmail is known as both a spam magnet and originator. Meaning not only will you get tons of spam, but e-mail you send may be blocked due to its free e-mail service of origin. Of course, this problem is not unique to Hotmail - all of the better known free e-mail services are targets for spam, precisely because everyone knows that millions of people use them because they are, well, free. And Hotmail and Yahoo! are some of the most spoofed e-mail domains around by spammers.

But aside from those known issues, which I won’t cover here, few people actually stop to think about this…

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