What free e-mail account is best?

I use gmail, and am very pleased with it.

You can change all of those things in your settings.

I have gmail but still have my old aol account from 20+ years ago.  My kids make fun of me about that plus the fact that I still pay around $5 per month for it.  That was because way back, AOL had a scrapbook message board and I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose it. 

AOL.com emails are free now?  I wonder if my old one still works!

Me too. I don’t know how to use Gmail, but I’ve never used it.

I’ve used Yahoo! Forever without any problems or concerns. Tons of storage, you can create folders, and I don’t get much spam there either.

It works great on my iPhone, using the mail accounts.

With gmail at least, you can create pretty much as many aliases as you want. Say your email was monklady@gmail.com you could make an alias by adding "+" and then the text you want after "monklady" and before the "@" 

like this: 

monklady+mailing@gmail.com  for your mailing lists
monklady+church@gmail.com  for your reply-alls 

then you can set up rules/filters so that, for example, anything that you get which is sent to monklady+mailing is automatically deleted, anything sent to monklady+church is marked as read and moved to a specified category, etc, whatever you choose really. 

Gmail will do this automatically for you if you choose the tabbed inbox. I have my regular inbox which is mostly person to person emails. Then the Promotions with all the store adds. I just search for the store I'm going to. Then the Updates tab which has emails regarding any accounts I have ie Amazon notifications, my banks, receipts from online stores, etc (note these are only emails about my account or purchases not advertising emails). And the Social tab that has notifications from social media or groups like here.
You don't have to tell it what to put where it just does it! The biggest thing I had to learn was to utilize the powerful search function. I don't sort anything into folders (but you can if you want). I just do a search with keywords, sender's name, subject or combo of all the above. Such a time saver!

I also like the star options. You can choose different colors if you want to help differentiate emails and sort by stared emails too.

I don't like the way gmail does it automatically. I like to break the promotional/ads down further for one thing. Also there are some promotional or social media things that come in that I want to go straight to my inbox. So I'm glad for the feature for some people like you, but I'm also glad you can delete the way it does it automatically and do it the way you want for people like me.

I also use the search function, but find there are times when it is better to use a folder. For example, we just went on vacation. I set up a folder with the "United kingdom" and then sub folders such as "London", "Oxford", "Transportation" and further subfolders of "Plane", "Rail" etc.

The majority of email stuff I do is on the computer so it doesn't automatically download to my phone. If I leave it the way gmail does it and do a search for "delta" then it will pull in ALL delta promotional things, social media things (from the travel blogs I follow) and my plane ticket info. If I am having to access that over very slow data that can be a real problem. By putting it in one of my trip folders I can access it by wifi before I leave or pull it in much faster over data.

I have several things like this where my own folders work, much, much better than gmail automatically does.

Another vote for Gmail.