As all travellers know, accessing home e-mails from a
free service such as Yahoo or Hotmail is fantastically useful, especially
for those long trips away.

From 16 July, Hotmail will end the free service that
makes it possible to check e-mail accounts held with net service providers
via its website. There are apparently around 110 million Hotmail users
who before now have managed all their e-mail accounts via the site. Earlier
this year, Hotmail rivals Yahoo and Lycos introduced charges for similar
services. Anyone wanting to check other accounts, so called POP mail,
will have to sign up for the MSN Extra Storage service which, in the UK,
costs £19.95 per year. In addition to getting access to the POP mail
service, those signing up for Extra Storage get 10 megabytes of space
that lets them get and send larger attachments and ensures that their
account stays live even if they stop using it for 30 days. Many net experts
see the charging of fees for once free services as an inevitable part
of the web's development.

Many companies with websites are looking for new ways
to offset the cost of running their net business now that revenue from
advertising is harder to come by and investor funds are scarce.

Anyone wanting to still use a free POP mail service can
find a comprehensive list at emailaddresses.com.