Something that plays nice. Don’t need many bells and whistles.
My Wife is getting a new Android phone and has never had an email outside of her work account. I use hughes.net, but we are reluctant to build an email for her there. Hughes has some real problems.
Hot mail? Google mail? Which, why and what others?
I’d go with Google mail, since Android is a Google product, and the integration between Gmail and Android is pretty much guaranteed to be easy & straight forward.
The email app that’s built in plays nicely with most POP3 and IMAP accounts. K9 deals with some of the bugs that the native app chose to ignore, plus it works with gmail.
If she’s getting an Android phone, it might require her to have a gmail account before she can activate it - at least mine did, about 14 months ago. My husband set up a throwaway account since he already has one he uses, but one was needed to go through the activation setup.
My info is old, though - they might have changed it.
I got my Android phone a few months ago (Samsung Captivate)…I don’t think a Gmail account was required, but signing in with your Gmail account was part of the initial setup. I’ve had no problems using Gmail on my phone. Getting my Roadrunner account to work with the built-in email program was a bit of a challenge, but it’s fine now.
Yes, since she will have to make a google account to use her phone anyway, might as well use the email portion of that account.
And just FYI, some Android phones (all of them?) have TWO email apps. One is just “email,” which will work ok, but the other is specifically the gmail app, so obviously plays nicer with gmail.