Gmail is pretty good if you don't mind the NSA reading your mails.

Really, almost any email service will work fine. They all have the same features nowadays, even Yahoo and Hotmail have pretty much gotten up to par with Gmail.

Just make sure you have a 25- or 30-letter password and you'll be fine. Make it into a sentence that you'll remember, and don't bother with special symbols or any of that junk. Just make it real real long.

The regular free ones are Gmail. Outlook and Yahoo.
If you want a bit more privacy you can try the less advanced Protonmail or Openmailbox.
If you use a custom domain you can use Zoho or Yandex.

I would use Gmail because it's the most reliable and has the most features. Alternatively I would use my own domain with Zoho, as when you use your own custom domain you never have to change your email address again, even if you wish to change to a different email provider.

Does gmail require a google+ account. I've read on here how many deride that.

I believe they stopped forcing that on everyone. And even if you do get it, you can disable it.

All of the obvious providers work well enough. I use Yahoo.

If you use the popular ones keep in mind that all the good nicks are already taken.

your choices are pretty much a, b, or c.

I've been using fastmail.com for a while.

I wouldn't personally recommend getting a gmail account as they're now letting marketers check their lists against Google's to mine the crap out of it.

Gmail wasn't so bad in the past, but over time it's gotten worse and worse.

If there was one piece.of advice I can give you, and I have had this question myself recently, is don't, for the love of whatever, go with hotmail or outlook as its known now. I have had an account with them as long as I can remember and it was always good. Then gatesexit happened and all m$ product have got progressively worse over the years. Nowhere is this more evident than outlook.com. It is dreadful, hardly ever working on IE which their own browser. Half the time it doesn't send mails, they disappear, not even in drafts, it is very slow. If you try to put links in it "helpfully" puts a preview in, taking up most of the space, don't even try to use it on mobile, cant find most of the things when the keypad is open. Really, its very, very nad, and just gets worse at each update. Just to rub it in, they send you a feedback form once in a while and when you reply its fecking awful, ignore it. Now I am not saying gmail is great, as its not, and it is naff of mobile, but its light years ahead of outlook.com, although everything you send via it is scanned and used in a court of advertising against you.

Simple answer, there isn't a good web email system for free.

Well, that's not good. I don't want my p0rn perversions to be marketed;)

Gmail has done me well.

Of the free ones go Gmail (yahoo doesnt seem to play nice with non IE/chrome based browsers)

Low cost paid?. Try fastmail .Been using it for years - very little downtime. Excellent service.

If you have your own personal computer - getting outlook is real nice. It integrated with Windows 10 - so it appears as a status update message with all important mails organized as needed.

Otherwise Gmail offers the most services for a single account.
Also Gmail ( and yahoo ) will be offering PGP encryption in email by next year - for those users who are joking about the NSA.

The way the PGP encryption works is 2 keys are generated by you. A Public key and a Private key. The Public key is sent to the person sending you the email, which encrypts the message. The private key you keep. Only the private key can decrypt the email, otherwise if some one badly wants to read it, they will have to brute force it and that may take some time based on the encryption pattern you used.