It's not crazy to pay for an email account

— -- Question: I want to move my email from Yahoo, but Gmail's privacy issues scare me. What other options do I have for a reliable address independent of my Internet provider?

Answer: Google's free, ad-supported email service has a lot going for it, but knowing that nobody besides your correspondents reads your messages isn't among them. Instead, automated software scans them to see what advertisements would match them best, with occasionally creepy results.

But opting out of Gmail may not be that easy: If you don't mind that ad system, it's the strongest of the big-name Web-mail services.

Take Yahoo, for example. I can see why this reader said he's had his fill with it; Yahoo still charges $19.99 a year for the ability to download messages to a computer, something you get for free from Google. And Gmail supports a smart standard called Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) that keeps your email in sync (including details like what messages you replied to, forwarded, or flagged for follow-up) among multiple computers and phones. Yahoo only supports the older Post Office Protocol (POP) system. That works, sort of, if you only download email to a single computer, but chaos ensues if you try to start answering messages from different machines.

Microsoft has put serious effort into Hotmail in the past few years, but it, too, fails to compete with Google by only offering POP access. And setting up an account at a personal domain name instead of the hotmail.com and live.com addresses the service hands out can get a little trickier than it is with Google, (where I get mail sent to my robpegoraro.com address).

AOL's free mail service, in turn, allows IMAP and POP offline access but doesn't permit using your own domain name. Apple's otherwise-good iCloud mail service shares that inexplicable defect. Not everybody needs that feature, but not offering it suggests that a company is too set on stamping its brand on its users' email addresses.

As for the email account your Internet provider includes, you can usually forget it unless you never plan on using a different company for your online access, ever. Plus, most mass-market services offer horribly inferior e-mail products, with limited storage and POP-only access.

One better alternative is paying a third party for email-only service. Pobox, for example, charges $50 a year for an ad-free address with 10 gigabytes of storage and offline access by POP and IMAP and the option of using your own domain name. (Forward-only accounts, which relay mail sent to your personal address to the inbox of your choice, cost less.) Opera Software's FastMail.fm offers a similar deal for $39.95 a year.

I've heard good things about both services from trusted sources over the years. Neither has the most lucrative business model, but they've also survived two tech busts so far.

Your last option, if you've registered a personal domain name, is to see if your domain registrar offers a decent email service to go with it. It may not—I've seen some barely surpass what my own Internet providers have offered.

Tip: Don't let an old e-mail address collect dust

If you're leaving behind an old e-mail address, please take a moment to put it out of its misery: Either close it outright (ensuring that anybody who e-mails you there will get a "no such address" bounce) or set it up to forward to an address you check somewhat regularly.

Look, none of us are all that good at keeping contact lists current, and if people keep sending messages to an abandoned account, they won't know of their mistake. If you're not in a position to dispose of the old address properly, at least list your current contact info at a site most people can find you at, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or a personal blog.

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Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.