I can highly recommend just biting the bullet and getting a domain name, it's the only flexible choice. (£3.50 per year for a.co,uk, I use 123-reg.co.uk)
Once you have this, you are highly flexible, you decide what you point it at regarding e-mail..
1. You can point it wherever you want, so you only give out your domain e-mail address (whatever@mydomain.co.uk) and you can choose where to 'direct' this to, it might be a hotmail account one year, an ISP account another..
e.g. you can say *@mydomain.co.uk points to
bob67326764764734@ymail.com, or
bob2734653745723@virginmedia.co.uk, etc
You can change this anytime, so if you decide to move e-mail providers/ISP, you can just redirect it to the new place, so you only have to ever have 1 e-mail address
2. You can use aliases, in other words if you sign up to a forum or shop or whatever you can use things like "talkphotography@mydomain.co.uk" , so you know exactly where the e-mail has come from. The rules are simple, you can just say *@mydomain.co.uk is directed to
bob23412783471283@hotmail.co.uk, leaving you free to use any name you want before the @ and it's always be 'directed' straight to your hotmail address..
Other then that, I've been using GMail for 2 years now and found this the most flexible, it has IMAP/POP and you can even aggregate other e-mail accounts into it using IMAP/POP.. I actually fully use them directly for their e-mail servers, and pointed my domain at them, which offers a little more integration. Regarding privacy, the golden rule is, if you have anything you consider highly private, don't go anywhere near the internet, Google are exceedingly closely scrutinised making it far harder for them to really do anything untoward with your data without the entire world noticing..
Just food for thought.. £3.50 spent on a domain name is the biggest advice I can give in moving your e-mail into the 21st century!
