I've been using Hotmail for years and it sucks. I was introduced recently to GMail, put out by Google. It's free, very clean look and you get 2 GB of space. Plenty of bandwidth for mailing large files to. They have an archive feature and they track your messages by "conversations" so you don't get a separate email line for everytime you respond back and forth to someone. They have great filtering technology and good search options for your archived mail. You do have to be invited to sign up so if anyone's interested let me know and I'll send you an invite.

Thought somebody might be interested. I've really been happy with it so far. I think you can read up on it at GMail

OH yeah, there's not a lot of people on it right now so you can probably get that email name you've always wanted to get.