I have received some bogus emails from friends who use hotmail. I have gmail and have been pleased with it - very few junk emails make it to my inbox, and it seems to be pretty used friendly, but it's not like I use too many of the features on it.
May in Jersey - I assume they still offer it, but at one time gmail had it so you could automatically forward mail from another address to your gmail which is how I slowly transitioned mine from hotmail way back when.
Amma - very good point about the passwords. Another option is to use something similar, but different for each site. I won't go into detail what I do, but I have a different password for each site that's difficult to figure out (definitely not something contained in the dictionary), but easy to remember.