What provider/email address should I pick?

Aside from price, which should in this case be $0, you need to consider storage space, ease of use, and security. Further, you should be able to register YOURGROUPNAME@… or YOURNAME@… as an email address. While an email address @YOURDOMAIN.com would be preferable, if you can get one that looks “official” enough and uses your group’s or organization’s name, or one that uses your own name, this would be the next-best option.

Not all free providers are created equal

Gmail

Gmail makes the top of our list for one of the best free email accounts. Gmail is Google’s free email service that has a really nice and modern feel to it, and there are numerous shortcuts you can use to make it even easier to work with. It is highly customizable and integrated with a calendar.

Gmail shares a massive 15 GB of email storage with other Google services, which makes it super easy to share files with email recipients straight from your Google Drive account without having to leave Gmail, even files as large as 10 GB!

An email address at Gmail is set up in the format example@gmail.com. However, messages can be sent to example@googlemail.com as well, or even example+(anything can be written in here)@gmail.com, and they will still arrive in your regular Gmail inbox.

Tip: If you have a YouTube account, you can login to Gmail with the same information since YouTube is another Google service that’s accessed through a Google account.

Outlook

Outlook.com (Outlook Mail) is Microsoft’s free email service that, like Gmail, has a solid interface that’s easy to work with. Free email accounts created with Outlook.com are configured as example@outlook.com. Outlook is intuitive to use and customizable. it is also integrated with a calendar function.

Note: Microsoft’s email addresses used to be setup as @hotmail.com and @live.com. If you have one of those addresses you can still login to Outlook.com, but any new accounts set up will include the newer @outlook.com. More

ProtonMail

ProtonMail is encrypted, which means that sending and receiving email is 100% secure. Visit our section on encryption for details on this. Since there is a premium plan available, the free one is limited to 500 MB of storage space and can only send up to 150 messages per day (which is more than enough for most people anyway).

Tutanota

Like ProtonMail, Tutanota is encrypted. The difference is that the free version gives you a few more options, which makes us favor it over ProtonMail. A premium version is available.

Yahoo

We strongly recommend AGAINST using Yahoo for anything. There have just been too many incidents with hacking over the recent years. Therefore, if you are tempted: refrain. The same goes for Ymail and anything else connected to Yahoo. Added negative: last we checked their 2-factor authentication used five instead of 6 digits, which means it’s impossible to add it to a normal authenticator app like Google Authenticator.