Email communication is becoming a pretty standard part of communicating, and even your 80 year old grandmother is emailing and instant messaging (IM) her friends and relatives. As a result of this, there are a plethora of free email providers, but which services provide the best free webmail services? With so many email providers, it can be a little confusing to determine which ones provide the best free webmail services.

When you are selecting an email provider, you want to ensure that the company you select to handle your correspondence is the one of the best and that they offer features to make your life easier. Of course every webmail service offers basic email, but the best free webmail offers more than just the standards.

Probably one of the top features that most people look for in choosing the best free webmail account is the amount of storage offered. Recently, many of the top free providers have either removed their storage restrictions or include such a huge amount of storage that you have more than enough space to receive and store all your important emails.

One of the awesome features that is now offered by the best free webmail providers is the ability to chat, or send instant messages, to your contacts and friends from right inside of your email account. At least two of the best known free webmail providers, Yahoo and Gmail, offer this capability. With Yahoo, you can even send text messages to your contacts' cell phones so they do not even have to be available on the service's chat interface. This is a very convenient feature.

When you are trying to select the best free webmail account for your needs, you may also want to have the ability to download email from your favorite webmail account into your favorite email program, such as Outlook or Eudora. In order to accomplish this, you will need to choose a free webmail service that offers POP download.

Another feature to consider when looking for the best free webmail (especially if you are always on the go) is the ability to access your email from your mobile device. For people who do like to be tethered to a computer but still need to receive their email, this is an essential feature.

Lately, there has been an explosion of spam and viruses spread by email, and another feature that all of the best free webmail providers include with your account is the ability to aggressively filter out spam and any harmful threats. Emails that are categorized as spam go into a separate folder, and incoming email is scanned for any potentially harmful viruses, trojans, or worms.

Ultimately, when selecting the best free webmail provider, you will need to decide which features are essential for what you need to accomplish. There are numerous helpful reviews online to help you decide which email service is right for you. And since they are free, it may be helpful to sample a few different services before choosing the one that works for you.