Several companies offer free email accounts. They do that so they can get their advertising in front of you.....its become a major in-your-face business.
Hotmail is by far the worst as its owned by microsoft....their entire world revolves around advertising crappolla.
If thats not bad enough, when you use their service, they install text adds as signatures to all your out-going emails...you don't see that. It won't be long until the same advertising you see when you log on goes out to your email recipients...
Yahoo is just about as bad and they load you up with unwanted emails in your Inbox with all kinds of offers of their other products & services, spam from within.....nothings free and they are both part of the spam process rather then the solution...
Gmail, another free web based email service....from Google is just the opposite. No ads on your opening page and no hidden attachments to Outgoing emails....
Google had a totally different business plan that doesn't involve spamming their customers...and putting a bunch of crappolla advertising in front of them...
They offer several other very useful services and software items also...Google Earth and Picasa for example...
Picasa is a very neat user-friendly entry level photography program for altering your digital pictures....its also free with no strings attached.
http://www.picasa.google.com