Yeah, well...
I can say I've at least tried just about every provider of free and more or less cheap emailing services. AOL - sucked hairy moose 'nads. Yahoo - started out useful, got crippled more and more until it plain didn't matter anymore. Hotmail - yech, it still feels like biting into a pus-filled donut. I also hold or at least held mail accounts with a vast number of free email providers all around the globe, be they of the more or less anonymous and disposable kind or just because I fancy being closer in mail and mind with another provider/spammer/company of choice. Some people really prefer to not only speak to customers/sellers in their own language, but also see that you care enough to actually maintain a mailbox in their country of residence. Hardly anything seems to matter more to new contacts in France than to see you're flashing some .fr address, and Germans easily seem much more friendly when you address them in proper German hailing from a .de address. Even though the actual shipping address is somewhere different, language and domains go a long way well before credit card data or other financially relevant information is exchanged.
As far as I can remember, the easiest, quickest and most thorough way to damage your reputation was to use a Hotmail address.
Oh, and as for having fun with Nigerian scammers or their international counterparts - nothing beats an email address in their country of residence and - bonus points - having a buddy with enough savvy, guts and language skills to make playing with them more fun than counting sheep or going fishing.
I felt the Apple services to be more of a sinkhole for money and hopes and dreams than actually giving me what was promised. That felt especially off when I could reproduce pretty much the same functionality for 100% free with little effort and no hassle, and saw me bid farewell after the last two, nay, three big 'evolutionary changes', which felt more like revisiting the promised land of computational Neanderthal to me. I don't trust the cloud, full stop. I don't want to rely on the cloud. I'm a very down-to-earth and earthbound kind of person, I don't think having thousands of miles of cabling and wiring and airwaves between me and my sensitive, business or personal data is a very smart thing to want.
As much as I was wary and plain paranoid about Google Mail in the beginning, I really wouldn't want to go back to a - personal - life without GMail. Free IMAP that works and doesn't suck, incredibly high server performance and reliability, access from just about any web-enabled device of choice no matter how well secured or locked down - I think GMail really has it all, and it deserves the first place, especially when looking at the competition. Just going to the Yahoo website gives me brain spasms, and going on hotmail/outlook online still feels well dirty.
The only thing I keep up is actually using different Google/Youtube logins for specific purposes, so as to keep some fields of interest compartmentalized/separated, as I was under the impression that Google turned a bit weird for me when I rolled all of my areas of interest and trackable activities into one account. Sure, the ads got a bit more interesting for their random oddness and obscure novelty factor, but not at all more useful.
