The emphasis these days seems to be free email over paid for email, can you really earn from banner ads and do users really want advertising everytime they collect their mail?
I personally don't, i have a personal email account with mailbank.com.
My research has shown that if have a good domain name relevent to users interests and you offer pop3 as well as webmail and wap and no advertising, then they will pay.

Anyone else have experience or thoughts on this as all software solution for email seemed to based around the idea of free mail, GMail included.

Mailbank quoted me 60,000 users at $9.95 each about 6 months ago. I've been contemplating the same thing. If you have some good domains and offer free email, you will be paying a lot in bandwidth, space etc and these days, it is hard to get sponsors for banner advertising. I plan on trying the paid model to cover costs and test run it for a few months. If going the free model, I may test out everyone.net.

I think it all depends on your domains if you go paid model and what your goals are. Do you want a huge subscriber base like yahoo mail or hotmail? If so, free is the way to go but be prepared to pay for a lot of expenses and make sure you have some form of revenue as a result ... sponsors. If you don't have that in place, it may make sense to charge an administrative fee of $9.95 per email address to cover costs. People want free but make sure you have some business plan behind it.

If you just want to create stickiness with one domain, I don't believe it is really an issue. I have several hundred good domains and if it was free, I could be signing up 10,000 people per week. That gets to be an issue if it grows at that rate.

Kevin

Hi, yes mailbank is my model for the service. The domain name you have is important, it needs to be worth paying for as i believe the ones i have are. They are for a specific past time/ sport, i also wish to offer web space. I don't want to go the free, seems very unrelable in terms of revenue, and as you say it can end costing in resources. Lower numbers and known revenue are what i am after.