I don't get it - why is everybody using accounts like hotmail, yahoo! and other free providers in the first place? Everyone connects to the internet, right? So everybody has some sort of ISP, right? The mayority of ISP's provide email-support, right? I had myself a little counting:

Currently, I have at least 4 mailboxes (not counting hotmail-like free services):

2 from ISP-subscribtions (both 15mb max), 1 at college (32.5mb), 1 at debian-box that one of my friend keeps running (no quota, fair use policy). Furthermore, I have 2 boxes at work. That makes a total of six. Granted, I don't use those at work for private usage.

Accessebility, you say? Both ISP-boxes have both POP3 and Webbased access, the one at college can be popped and can be reached trough ordinary telnet (pine, baby!) - The one at my friends place can be popped too, but is reachable 'only' trough ssl otherwise (so, i'm behind a win32 computer which is my own, aka not set up to read the account using pop3, I can't have direct access to it.

I'm not even counting the (filterable) aliases here! With that, the number of addresses would be 18 (including the boxes themselves, but excluding work-related addresses). Out of that 18, fourteen are accessable trough webmail, 17 through pop, 4 trought SSL and three trough telnet alone.

And the sad part is: I've rerouted and/or forwarded most of them to 3 different aliasses...

I'm not trying to show of my incredible number of boxes here - as a matter of fact, I'm sure that there are hopes of people that actually have more boxes than I do - but my point is: why wine over the loss of service from Yahoo, Hotmail or any other 'free' service? I didn't do anything to aquire these addresses specificly, they were all given to me as a service, while I actually signed up for another service. I can't imagine that there would be many people today with access to the internet that haven't got some form of mailbox at their disposal...