Use a free web based email and save Amazon rainforest with every email

There are several companies offering free web based email accounts (like Hotmail and Yahoo!), but only few which donate a portion of their revenue to charity. So far I have found three of these:

Planet-Save

EcologyFund

Care2

EcologyFund uses some intrusive advertising like pop-ups and therefore I recommend using the other two instead. In addition to using less introsive advertising the ads you see on Planet-Save and Care2 are always related to ecological products and services. Many of these are actually quite interesting if you are into that sort of thing. Because of the excessive pop-up advertising I don't consider EcologyFund to really qualify as an Easy Donation. Planet-Save on the other hand is excellent and even better than the industry standard Hotmail.

The biggest advantage of using Planet-Save or Care2 instead of Hotmail is the amount of junkmail you are going to get. Even if you never tell anyone about your Hotmail account, you will soon start receiving junkmail and lots of it. With Planet-Save you will be getting significantly less junkmail if at all.

In addition to receiving less junkmail there are other benefits as well. For example you don't need to login every 30 days to keep your Planet-Save account active (like you do with Hotmail). For a simple comparison see the chart below. The chart refers to the free email service offered by each and Hotmail is included only as a comparison (using Hotmail does NOT create donations).

Comparison between Planet-Save, EcologyFund, Care2 and Hotmail:

	Planet-Save	EcologyFund	Care2	Hotmail
Mailbox size	25 MB	25 MB	100 MB	250 MB
Junk Mail filters	yes	yes	yes	yes
Retrieve messages from other email accounts	yes	yes	yes	not worldwide
Email forwarding and notification	yes	no	no	no
Auto Response (vacation mode)	yes	yes	yes	no
Sending attachments	2 MB	unlimited*	10 MB	10 MB
Automatic virus scanning	Yes	no	Yes	Yes
Security	Good	Poor**	Good	Good
Donations	25% of revenue	50% of revenue	5% of revenue	0%

* Although the size of sending attachments is not limited, there is unfortunately no counter to see how much of your attachment has been uploaded.
** Be carefull when using EcologyFund email from a public computer. After logging out you must also close the browser window, otherwise your email is accessible by merely pressing the back button!

Conclusion

Planet-Save and Care2 are good alternatives to Hotmail and other web based email services. If you use web based email, why not use Planet-Save or Care2 and you will automatically help raise a little bit of money for a good cause.

http://www.planet-save.com