Back to SquirrelMail - ni sure how many people like it but plenty of web hosting packages include webmail and I can point towards at least one which offers SquirrelMail, NeoMail and Horde (I have used all three, but Horde now has RSS news feeds included, OK, not as flexible as some application on your own PC, but you can subscribe to a number of popular sites without having to do anything more than click subscribe / unsubscribe).
On Ebay there have been hosting deals with either a small fee per year (eg $9.95) or even some with a "single fee for life" (I just paid US $40 {ie about 21 GBP} for a reseller hosting account allowing unlimited domains to be placed there).
Not every web host is identical in facilities of course - I suggest looking for cPanel / WHM (WebHostManager - on a reseller account which will allow you to host domains for friends as well) and Fantastico (allows installation of lots of different PHP apps with just a simple 'fill in a form(s)' setup). Although .INFO gets a bad press as a common domain for malware or spammers, you can get one registered for under 65p for the first year, and perhaps $7/year for second and subsequent years if you look around !
Some prefer .UK domains and they do work out quite cheap, too... So long as you can easily alter your Name Server entries via the registration firm's website, it doesn't matter whether the hosting is in the UK or US...
Also, you can get free hosting at
www.100webspace.com - I am experimenting with the e-mail side (one thing I don't appear to be able to do is set a mail catchall to redirect to GMail, just a local mailbox).
I can cope with that by grabbing the mail every hour and throwing it into a GMail account via Runbox.com, but cPanel hosting normally allows a 'catch all' to be defined to forward to a local (domain) POP box, or some other mail address, or to drop them in a bit-bin {blackhole}, or reject them {error 550 'fail'}.
