I am a geek. A giant Web geek. And I've got the wrist pain to prove it. I've been working as a freelance writer for almost two years, making my living off of the bountiful, eclectic data on the Internet; perusing, critiquing, reviewing, consolidating, creating.

I know where everything is on the Web (yeah, right) or at least I know how to find it (well, sometimes). There's tons of free stuff to be found in the New Economy, amongst them Web-based free online email.

"But I already have an email address", you whine, "why do I need another one"? Well, you don't, really. It's simply a luxury there for the plucking. Think how great it would be to give your lover/house mate/mother/dog an account of their own.

Or how you wouldn't have to use your work email address as your only contact while looking for another job. No one has to know what University you're affiliated with when you post to the newsgroups.

When pestered for a *valid* email address at a Website requiring registration, you can tell them to send their email advertising to any one of a dozen accounts you've created but never read.

If you don't want the clutter of mailing lists and discussion groups imposing on your private work inbox, you can direct this mail to a different, Web-based account that you check less often.

And, you can explore the limits of your creativity. Finally, you can realize your dream of being stinkybutt@flowers.com or MissAmerica@beautyqueen.com.

Certainly there's no shortage of email services to choose from. Let's first take a look at Hotmail, the Web's pioneer of free email. Recently bought out by Microsoft, this service offers quick registration, news and reviews, and a spell-checker and thesaurus for your outgoing emails.

You can easily sort and filter your email, save messages to their server, and the price is right. As with all complimentary Web-based services, your job as a consumer is to sit through their ever- present barrage of banner ads.

Another leader in the field is Juno . Juno offers free email in a easy-to- navigate window, a spell-checker, crisp graphics and a tolerable number of advertisements. The best and most unique feature of Juno is that you no longer have to be on the Web to enjoy it.

You can simply dial in to Juno's server directly without having to deal with the Web interface. Anyone with a functioning computer, a modem and the Juno software can have email anytime. Either download the software from their Website for free or pay $8.82 to have a diskette mailed to you (1-800-654-JUNO).

MailCity.com is certainly a contender when it comes to advanced features. Like Hotmail and Juno, here you can configure your account to block incoming messages from an ex-boyfriend or a company that keeps sending you spam.

You can also feel free to mail out a single document to as many recipients as you wish, or to create quick, short-hand names for your most common recipients (for example, your friend Theodore@bestfriend.com can simply become "T").

MailCity also offers Vacation Reply. If you know you won't be reading your email for a few days, Vacation Reply will automatically reply to every message received in your absence and let the sender know that you will reply shortly.

Click on over to Rocketmail and take a look at some of their unique features. They've made a deal with Four11, another Website specializing in "people finding."

Thus if you'd like to send some email to old college buddies or coworkers who you think might be online, Rocketmail will make it easy. RocketBot, their online assistance mascot, offers advice whenever you need technical help.

And, if you have a lot to say to all of your new correspondents, Rocketmail allows you the most amount of data storage space of any other service.

I suppose that free email is the latest trend from the search engines, as Excite, Yahoo!, AltaVista and Lycos all offer you, their viewers, complimentary services.

MailExcite is intertwined with the Excite community, and offers you the opportunity to post or shop from their classifieds section, chat with other MailExcite users or send them instant messages using PAL.

Its other features are comparable to other services of its type, and the number of banner ads seems surprisingly low.

Yahoo! Mail offers an enjoyable and enlightening tutorial for new users and those new to the Internet, plus concise technical information and step-by-step instructions on how best to manage all of the features of their mail program.

One of the first names in Webcrawling also wants to open up your lines of communication. The majestic peaks of AltaVista's eMail offers you easily accessible email communiques from any PC. You can also choose a unique iName to fit your dreams or personality.

Rather than being JaneDoe@altavista.com, for $14.95 a year you can be JaneDoe@doctor.com, @lawyer.com, @engineer.com, @london.com or any one of over 300 other iNames. For $23.95 a year, you can access your AltaVista eMail off the Web and from the mail reading program of your choice (such as Eudora, Netscape Mailer, etc.).

Following suit in the search engine wars is LycosMail. LycosMail will give you a few iNames for free, including JaneDoe@cheerful.com, @cybergal.com, @cyberdude.com (for Jane's brother, Joe), or @technologist.com. Other iNames are free for 30 days and then around $15 per year.

You can also expect free email forwarding to your present email address, thus you can hand out two separate email addresses but have the convenience of reading them both at the same place.

For less than $2 a month, you can read your LycosMail from your favorite mailreading program. And, because LycosMail is tied into a search engine, you can quickly find stockquotes, online yellowpages, shopping venues, city guides and more.

Sure, they may be slow, and often times you may have difficulty finding a satisfying login name, but the convenience and cost of these free email services can't be beat. They're out there for the taking. Give them a try!