Since Gmail has, in my opinion, the best SPAM filtering available on web-mail and it allows for free POP this gives you an advantage!

I found that the spam filters on my mail host, which is Dreamhost, and Spam Assassin on my Linux machine, that I manage, were not doing the job and I was really tired of putting a lot of time into filtering garbage. I realized after looking into the issue that my Dreamhost mailboxes, which were already forwarded to Gmail, were not dumping that spam into Gmail's Inbox! So I decided to use Gmail to filter the spam for me.

If you have the ability to forward your messages to another account, you can forward them to Gmail and setup your mail client to get POP mail from Gmail rather than your mail provider.

This is a very effective spam solution. The best part is that I can log on to Gmail and look in the spam folder if by chance I think something made it there by mistake, which has never happened to me so far.

What makes their spam filter so effective is that it is continuously learning from millions of spam messages flagged by thousands of users. Allowing people to manage spam is way more powerful than software, because the filter learns from human intervention. Spammers change their tactics to trick software filters and the filters won't block certain types of messages, but I know for a fact what is and what isn't spam.

Other nice features in Gmail include the ability to automatically delete messages when I grab them via POP so I do not have to manage already read mail in Gmail. If you don't download your messages with your client they will remain in your Gmail mailbox so you do not need to worry about losing messages if you're out of town or at work. You can also forward messages from Gmail, like to your cellphone for instance.

You may want to consider removing forwarded messages from your provider, if they give you the option, or you mailbox will fill up. Some mailbox have a limit when they get so full it deletes older messages.

 I can also send mail from Gmail using my Dreamhost addresses. This will walk you through setting up this feature . To send mail from your main addresses in your mail client just setup SMTP to use whichever provider you prefer or leave it as is if it's already configured.

Gmail is a totally free web-mail solution from Google. You can create a free Gmail account here .