Webmail services give you a free email address.

Why would you want another email address? A few reasons:

• If your current email address gets too much spam, you can switch to a new one.
• If you want to get email only from certain people, you can give them just a free webmail address.
• A webmail address can be accessed from any web browser in the world, so you can check your email while you're on the road.

Where To Get a Webmail Account

There are lots of free webmail services, including:

• Google's Gmail
• Yahoo! Mail
• Hotmail

I'll use Yahoo! Mail as an example.

If you already have a Yahoo! account, you can use that when you to go mail.yahoo.com. If not, click the "Sign up" button and fill out the fields to create a new account.

Using Webmail

Here's what Yahoo! Mail looks like, which is similar to other webmail services:

Yahoo! Mail, main window

The main area on the right lists all the emails sent to your address. The left-hand area displays a list of your folders. Each webmail account comes with a few premade folders:

• Inbox — When a new message is sent to you, it's stored here. When you first log in to your webmail, you should start in your Inbox.
• Drafts — If you write a new email, you can save it without sending it. It'll go into this Drafts folder.
• Sent — Every email you send from this email address is stored here.
• Spam — Every webmail service automatically scans your incoming email for spam. If a message is flagged as spam, it's put here. You can review your spam for any legitimate messages which were accidentally flagged as spam.
• Trash — When you delete a message, it's put in this Trash folder, which you can then empty. If you accidentally delete a message, you can recover it from the Trash.

To read a message, click on its title. The message will be displayed in the area at the bottom of the page.

A selected email, and its contents

The top of the page contains a short toolbar of common email actions. To reply to an email, select it in the list, then click the "Reply" button. To delete it, click the "Delete" button. To move an email to a folder, just click and drag it to the folder, or click the "Move" button on the toolbar and select the folder where you want the email moved to.

You can create a new folder by clicking the "Add" button next to the "My Folders" item in the left-hand list. You can then organize your saved email into folders you create, in whatever system makes sense to you.