Yahoo Mail Plus

Basic Yahoo email addresses are free and offer 250MB of storage space. Subscribe to the Plus service, however, and your Mailbox is boosted to 2GB. You also lose the adverts, both on the sites and at the bottom of the emails you send.

The mail screen is well set out, with most of the options you’ll need available from the main screen. Wherever you click through to, you’ll always find a Check Mail and a Compose button in the same place, so you’re never more than a click away from a new email message. Through your email you can also send text messages to UK mobiles from 10p if you buy them in bulk (£4.50 for 45 messages) or 20p a pop for individual messages.

Yahoo’s Addresses database is among the most powerful, offering straightforward synchronisation with an excellent selection of likely partners such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape and Palm Desktop. And just to make things even more convenient, it also has an integrated Calendar, Tasks and Notepad, all also able to synchronise with any other software you may use.

The only thing you don’t get with this package is your choice of domain – your email address will stay as a ‘yahoo.co.uk’ and, with the service being so popular, new subscribers may find it difficult to use their real names without appending numbers or other nonsense to them.