I've had friends with Hotmail accounts that had a lot of problems 4-5 years ago if they didn't check their mail for a month or so.

These days, I recommend Gmail first, and Yahoo second. I use both, but have Gmail as my primary, as it has tons of storage, and usually works most places. I used to have domain name hosting, but at the time, they only allowed about 1000 emails to be stored, and started charging a lot for any overage. I have 50k or more emails stored on Gmail, which is nice, not having to delete anything, and getting large email attachments.