Google's Gmail Beta offers lots of promise, but there's an old standby that's been good and just got better. Find out who our pick is for the best free Web-mail service.

Lycos Mail

Lycos Mail is a competent mail service with a number of useful features, but it's badly in need of an overhaul.

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Norton AntiSpam 2005

Persistent performance issues with Norton AntiSpam 2005 have soured our opinion and lead us to recommend MailFrontier Desktop instead.

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MailFrontier Desktop

Of the antispam apps we've seen, MailFrontier Desktop is the best at doing exactly what it's supposed to do: block spam.

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McAfee SpamKiller 2005

Despite McAfee's acquisition of SpamAssassin and other technologies, SpamKiller 6.0 is a muddle of an antispam app.

Compare Prices | All Network Associates reviews

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 release candidate

It's hard to find a free e-mail client that can go toe to toe with Mozilla Thunderbird, now available as a version 1.0 release candidate.

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Netscape Mail

With good free options available, such as Yahoo Mail and Google Gmail, there's simply no reason to go with Netscape Mail.

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McAfee Total Protection 2007

McAfee Total Protection 2007 does what it says on the label -- it protects your PC from all sorts of nasty attacks, albeit at a fairly high cost to your system performance, especially on older PCs.

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Steganos Internet Security 7.0

Steganos Security Suite is the best data encryption suite available, able to encrypt both e-mail and entire hard drive partitions.

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Corel WordPerfect Mail

For its office productivity suite, Corel creates an inexpensive alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

All Corel reviews

ZoneAlarm Security Suite

ZoneAlarm Security Suite puts Norton Internet Security and McAfee Internet Security to shame with its easy-to-use features.

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Gmail

Google's new Web mail service is free and provides a gigabyte of storage, but also raises privacy concerns. We put the beta version through its paces.

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