OB Roundup Yes, you can send your pals a message in Facebook, and you can get to them more immediately with an SMS, iMessage, twitter DM, or instant message, but there are still plenty of usage cases that call for a good-old-fashioned email account. Just try signing up for any Web service without one. We scrutinized the five leading Web-based email services here. In descending order of U. In many ways, any of these will serve you well, but there are still noteworthy differences. The webmail space has recently been shaken up with the introduction of Outlook. The service is still technically in preview, but since July 31, the public has been able to create Outlook. Google's Gmail, in its eighth year of existence, has for a while been considered by many to be the cool email address to have, despite the search giant's scanning of all your email contents to serve you targeted ads and its busy, spreadsheet-like interface. What drove people to the new service were its at-the-time huge 1GB storage allowance, conversation view, and improved spam reduction. But despite its provenance from much maligned Microsoft, Outlook. With all these changes, it may well be time to re-evaluate your email provider. To guide you in this decision, and to get a deeper look at your options for Web-based email services, click through into the in-depth reviews below. FEATURED IN THIS ROUNDUP Free. The old-timer among email services gets a complete makeover in its latest incarnation. Its refreshed interface is now clean, clear and fun. As you'd expect from the maker of leading instant messaging service AIM, the email client offers on-page access to your chat buddies. You don't get as many inbox helpers and organizers as you do with Outlook. On the downside, Aol Mail has the most distracting ads among the major webmail services. Free Gmail gained a large following thanks to its large storage allowance, fast operation, and low level of spam. It's fast, clean, and the recent redesign improves on its appearance. And there's the advantage of it's built-in IM and video calling feature. But Gmail still has bothersome interface quirks, lacks some useful tools found in competitors like Outlook. And the site's interface is no slouch, either, with a preview panel and the ability to pull in inboxes from other services like those compared here. You will have to pay for a premium account, however, if you want to access your mail from another email client, and there's no built-in instant messaging. Free Though Hotmail has undergone numerous major updates, with some of the best inbox tools around, Outlook. Microsoft's new webmail service has the best inbox cleaning and organizing tools around, including a Sweep feature that deals with newsletters. You can also view photos and videos right in the inbox, and IM is built in and it even works with Facebook chat. POP and IMAP access are free, and you can create alias addresses for free. Yahoo's clean, still-fresh interface makes excellent use of tabs, and you get a preview pane. Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S...
