It seems Hotmail has followed in Yahoo’s footsteps, by getting rid of their POP access. I’m not upset–you get what you pay for, after all–but I will kind of miss being able to check my home account when not at home.
Of the slew of various free e-mail websites out there, are there any left that still offer POP access as part of the basic free package?
This is a good thing. I was planning on dropping hotmails spammy crappy service anyway.
I think there are probably a few free webhosting sites that come with a free email address, but these also have a startup and/or annual cost for domain registration.
If you buy an Apple Macintosh, you can get a free mac.com email account. Supports POP and IMAP access, no ads, and there’s currently a beta-test of a web-page-access feature.
Only known downside right now is that apparently Apple is using spam filters on incoming mail, and they seem to be a tad too aggressive… 
I think the best/ most dependable one I’ve seen lately is ureach.com. They also have telephone messaging, etc. that comes as part of the service, and pop access both ways.
-Stil
ePrompter, available from www.ePrompter.com will poll and download your POP mail, plus many web-based email programs. However, it doesn’t handle attachments or HTML. Still, it is free.
Try the one I use, MyRealBox.com. Stupid name, but reliably spamfree.