Hi, in your opinion which free e-mail service available these days on the market is the most trustworthy (safe) if we are talking mainly about privacy policy?
I've found few articles about Gmail and privacy: http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4707 http://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html http://www.google-watch.org/ http://www.davidairey.com/google-gmail-security-hijack/ It doesn't look good...
I use POP3 through my ISP "Cableone" it is very trust worthy and they have an excellent Spam program and all mail through their servers is Antivirus and antimalware scanned. I run their mail program through Thunderbird.
I use my ISP-provided POP account a lot. Other than that I switched to Gmail. It seems to have less ads than Yahoo Classic mail had. As for privacy, I don't think that there is a lot of difference between the more popular programs like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.
I use 2 accounts my ISPs account, I don't reguard the account as at all secure. Inbox.com they have a pretty good spam filter(I feel somewhat more comfortable here but still on guard). But I still filter the email with Mail washer(both accounts) before downloading it to thunderbird and I use Eraser to erase the sensitive emails.
For about $25 you can get a domain name with Whois Guard and a years hosting then run/manage your own email accounts. You can then pipe them in to Outlook, plus you have both local and online backups. I wouldn't do it any other way, not to comfortable with he folks at Google and co having control over my personal data such as email.
Gmail (SSL POP3 login). I used Live (hotmail) as a main one, but sometimes it refuses to accept emails, so I forward emails from Gmail to Live and then it works.
I've been using Gmail for 2 years, and I'm totally satisfied with the service they provide (best spam filter around IMO, antivirus check, and a host of other services). A real "in the cloud" provider. The privacy issue has more to do with one's own paranoia sending messages on the internet. No matter what some people claim no system can guarantee complete privacy, that can only be achieved through mail encryption.