I use Hotmail. Works all of the time.

I had a Gmail account. Hardly ever lets me access it here.

I use yahoo and it's pretty spotty sometimes.

Have used g-mail and it often failed to load.; yahoo has same problems.However, hotmail seems to work fine, especially the 'new' Outlook version.

I also used g-mail and it always says some features don't work properly..it's really slow too.

G-mail has not been working well here since before the big C*ngress.  Google service itself remains sporadic.  Hotmail is fine but in the past it has also gone down for periods of time.  Yahoo is also problematic these days, for reasons that I can't just fathom.  Like others, I do have a QQ account and a local 126.com which I use a back-up.

QQ EMAIL relatively stable and fast

hotmail is the best,follwed by yahoo mail,gmail very seldom works with me

I use Yahoo!. Never had any problems accessing from my laptop or Android phone.

I use gmail nothing wrong there. ALthough it is slow at times I prefer it over the other one's. Espeically since they got the new background layout! 

Ha ha, I said : 'new"!!

I have different accounts, depending on who i communicate with, for example, my Yahoo for students. After my first visit to China, my primary acccount was hacked by a certain government !!

I have Gmail and it does vary from day to day depending on how much monitoring is being done. On particularly bad days I fire up my "over the wall" software and miraclee of miracles it works fine.

the most secure and reliable is obviously the email providers from the big telecoms, but i think their sign up is only in chinese. yahoo and hotmail work but are not secure. if you signed up for yahoo, google, or hotmail from abroad, the fashists over at google, and m$ will likely require sms verification to keep tabs on you. if you dont do this, youre locked out of your account. and it's very possible you do, because alot of foreign cell phones have no service in china. therefore youll never get the sms.  this is one of the reasons why i dont mess with gmail, hotmail, or yahoo anymore. it's also annoying how google, yahoo, and hotmail will try to extort your new phone number periodically via forced sms verfication.  not to mention gmail doesnt work. qq works but has the potential not to if you dont use it for a long time. ive also noticed that qq not longer gives imap and pop service. theres a  free german email called mail.com, but they suspend accounts regularly and randomly. you can use mail.com to sign up for things, but not as a permanent email.  yandex works but also will close your account if you dont use it regularly. it comes in english, but its a russian service. also, keep in mind that if you sign up for chinese emails, western email servers tend to block chinese emails. so sending email from qq may never make it to yahoo because western goverments and their fashist corperations blacklist chinese emails. sensorship is indeed a 2 way street. unfortunately no one talks about the other side of it.  ive performed numerous experiments on this. one possible option is for you to get your friend to sign up an email for you with a foreign service provider. in australia, you have telstra, and optus. germany has tmobile. italy has tiscali. they usually offer free email accounts, but you have to have an account with them. since most westerners use gmail, they dont make use of their service provider emails, allowing you to fill the vaccum. with that said. email is kind of a thing of the past, and because of how unreliable they are, people have moved away from them and into messengers like wechat, or skype but that also has problems of getting locked out for securety reasons. i had my skype account suspended, and i just abandoned skype altogether, and never bothered to sign up again, just as i abandoned yahoo, and gmail years earlier. i would abandon my wechat too, because its too secure, but unfortunately everyone is on it