Last Update: 12/30/15

By Ayesha Court, USATODAY.com

Pop quiz, everyone: Which do you do first in the morning, brush your teeth or check your email?

If you answered the latter and you're on the road a lot, it might just be time for a refresher course on the costs and benefits of email services for the itinerant.

Most frequent travelers have cottoned on to free Web-based email services such as Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail that allow you to check email from any computer, Internet kiosk or cybercafe. This way you don't have to schlep your laptop with your Internet service-provider (ISP) software on it
or try to find a computer on the road with the software already loaded. (Laptop travel how-tos)

That's how I can keep in touch while sipping espresso (between puffs on my Cuban stogie) in St. Lucia's Snooty Agouti cybercafe rather than lugging my laptop, batteries, plug and phone jack adapters to the beach with me. (Why I'd check my email in paradise is another subject.) 

Ahh, yes, that tempting "free! free! free!" promise. Before we all give in to it, there are two questions to answer: is anything ever really free? And, what is my home ISP doing to snatch back some of those 52 million Hotmail devotees? 

First up, the gratis issue. I never enjoyed economics, but I've got to hand it to Emperor Greenspan - he's right: nothing's free, there's always a tradeoff. 

With 'free' email, you trade privacy for convenience. When you log on to MSN's Hotmail, aside from adding to Bill Gates pot o' gold, you're also signing up for a lot of advertising and cookies that closely track your Web movements in a way that would make Hoover proud. The idea, of course, is to tailor the ads you see to fit you like a glove over time.

The other tradeoff is security. Remember a teensy little security breach at Hotmail in August 1999? Hackers broke into members' accounts and were able to gather passwords like the Vandals sacking Rome. Of course, like Rome, one successful sacker - or hacker - breeds a million more. (Welcome Goths! Make way for the Huns and barbarians). 

Now if you're just sending love e-pistles home rather than state secrets,security may not worry you. But outages and disappearing messages might.

Like Hotmail, Excite@Home's free email service went down a few times in 1999. Of course, pay ISPs aren't immune either. AT&T and MCI WorldCom have had their share of outages. And, though it's gotten better, there's a reason I still think of AOL as 'Always Off-Line.'

But as these are 'free' services, it's more difficult for consumers to demand legal redress for outages.

One more strike against free-dom: For those of you, like me, who save hundreds of email messages 'for later,' free web-based email services generally don't offer as much storage space for messages as your home ISP. That's why your account at Yahoo! Mail can delete any emails that put your account over three megabytes. Hotmail is even more miserly at 2.4 megabytes. Compared to this, most home ISPs are generous: 10 megabytes offered by MailandNews.com or the 2 megabytes for each screen name on AOL (up to 10 megabytes total). 

Oh, pish. Stop worrying so much, you say. Free Web-based email is so convenient, I'm sticking with it. And it makes me seem so footloose and fancy free to be, say, RemingtonSteele@Hotmail.com, it's almost sinful.

Whoa - come back from Thomas Crown Affair-land. I don't know about you, but in my world, the fewer passwords and names I use, the better. So I'm pleased to discover that, finally, the big ISPs rope-a-dope may be over. AOL, CompuServe, Mindspring, Earthlink and AT&T WorldNet now offer
various Web-based email services. It's true. Check their homepages carefully (some of them are hiding it in squinty print at the bottom of the page) for their new 'access email' features. I've got to hand it AOL - they've got their new email access right up top, ready and waiting.

Especially if brushing your teeth comes in second to logging on.