Seems everyone wants to give you a ton of free email. But there’s always a catch.

Google offers you a free gigabyte of storage, but insists that you let it snoop your mail and tack on ads that match your private subject matter. May have a small patent problem as well.

Lycos has a different spin. No ads. But you gotta pay for it. And you gotta move to the UK. Meanwhile, Lycos claims its really free email offering of 5 megabytes of storage is “more than any other major provider.”

While Yahoo has announced a jump for free user to 100 megabytes, as of this writing, the website still claims “Free 4MB storage - up to twice as much as other free email providers!” That’s 996 megabytes short of GMail, 1 megabyte short of Lycos and 96 megabytes short of Yahoo’s press clippings.

Where’s Hotmail? Still plodding along at 2 megabytes… for now.

Wild claims along with shifting… and shifty offers. Feels a bit used car-ish, doesn’t it?