I used to use hotmail. Then I got tired of the unbelievable amount of junk mail i was getting. And it was so slow! So i switched to yahoo and have had very few problems since. I do recommend having more than one e-mail account though (nothing is perfect).
Also, i don't see many problems with IE. The popups can be pretty annoying but there are programs to take care of that (and if you don't go to many porn sites
), you shouldn't have much.