The funny thing is, Toad, that Tomato has been onto me to start using the Gmail account she set up for me. At that time, Gmail did not allow for POP3 access, and so it was a non-starter.
Yahoo! mail does everything I want it to do for me. It allows me 250MB storage free (you can have more if you're prepared to pay) and I can access via the website on any computer, or download my mail into Outlook using the POP3 mail server. Yahoo! mail did go through a bad patch a few months ago (servers down etc.) but has been OK recently.
My feeling about Gmail is that it's a tail wagging dog product. A solution looking for a problem to solve. It's probably worth keeping in mind for the future, but for me for now, the benefits of Gmail are outweighed by the hassle of having to change my email addresses. It's on my list, but it's way down that list.
If you want to try something new, get Netscape 7.2 to replace IExplorer. I like Netscape MUCH more these days. A quality product with the added benefit of being immune to many computer viruses which exploit security weaknesses in IE.