If you’re like me and you are about to graduate soon you are probably looking for a new free email provider because your school address is going to run out, and someone has already taken all the reasonable variations of your name in Gmail.

These are some of your options:

• Lavabit was created as an alternative to Gmail in response to privacy concerns. I like that it is geared towards people like me who are at least semi tech-savvy, that there are multiple account options, and that they offer IMAP. (Note that the free options offer 128MB – 1GB of storage.) The major downsides are that they only allow underscores in their usernames and not periods, their current webmail interface looks like it’s circa 2000, and I can’t get over the fact that “lavabit” just doesn’t look professional on a resume.
• Inbox.com offers 5GB of storage. They have a very nice ajax-y web interface with multiple templates including one that is text-only. Downsides are that the homepage is cluttered, ugly and kind of sketchy (are they trying to trying to be the next Yahoo?). Also, no IMAP, and when you log into the web interface each time it bounces up from the bottom of your browser window, which is only cute the first time.
• GMX is the international version of German site GMX.net’s email service. They offer 5GB storage space, like Inbox.com. The interface is still in beta and has a few kinks. I wish there was a text-only version and I can’t figure out how to send my emails in plain text. Also it the interface pops up in a new window when you log in. But, they offer IMAP, and I like how short their domain name is. For now I think I am going to use them, although I am little suspicious that this is too good to be true because I haven’t figure out they are making money yet. Maybe when the interface goes out of beta there will be some ads in the side column — I noticed they conveniently left some blank space there. I wouldn’t mind that.