The market for free email service providers has become a bit over saturated lately, but when a heavyweight like My Space enters the arena people take notice. The social networking site has been struggling in recent years to hold its ground against arch rival Facebook, but now finally has a unique feature that might help set it apart. Facebook allows users to send messages back and forth, but this is limited to friends on your contact list and lacks many of the features you would expect from a traditional email account.

What makes the My Space offering so unique is the sheer number of users that that is brings to the table. With over 130 million accounts world wide, it instantly becomes the 4th largest email provider in the world and is second in the U.S. only to Yahoo. Google’s Gmail by comparison ranks a distant 5th. My space users will automatically be assigned an email address based on the vanity URL they occupy and changing the email address will also shift the URL of the profile page.

Feature wise it holds up well against the traditional providers, but unfortunately it doesn’t offer any type of POP/IMAP support. For some this isn’t a problem, but I’m personally not a huge fan of closed email services that don’t allow me to export my data. Should My Space choose to shut down the service somewhere down the road, your emails will be trapped.

Anyone plan on switching over to @myspace.com?

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