Zoho mail is not FREE anymore – Looking for alternatives

My hosting service expired:

Recently my hosting service on Hostgator expired and i was migrating my site to AWS. I migrated everything but AWS doesnt seem to have a simple email hosting platform. Its quite complicated to use their services as everything is distributed. 

Zoho was the way to go :

Zoho was a better alternative as i had used it before and i was able to send and receive emails for free until i reach certain number of users. So i setup everything and configured all the MX records and stuff and got the email working on the Zoho Webmail. The next step was to get the email working on Microsoft Outlook as i use it to store , send and receive emails.

What went wrong :

It was a straight forward setup and I already had another domains email working fine on the same outlook software with Zoho free email hosting. But to my shock the outlook kept complaining about my new domain email setup saying it cant verify or access the POP server for incoming mail. I was a little confused because i had set the same values as my other domain which Zoho recommends, but still the outlook was unable to access the server. 

Why it went wrong : 

 Zoho has stopped POP and IMAP access to its free email hosting service, meaning which you can access your email on their site using web mail but you cant receive the mail using outlook or any other software. They haven’t mentioned this anywhere on their site. 
Looks like they want you to visit their site so that they can advertise their products to you and have access to your data. If you use outlook all data will get deleted from the server so its of no use to them. Just my guess, i might be wrong 😀

Anyway, it was a waste of time because i tried to fix the email service for two days without knowing this. Such a shame. 
Here is what Zoho representative said about this, 

The options continues to be free for users who relied on it in the past, but for newly registered users, 
it is only available in the paid plan. New free users can use our web client and mobile app rather than external email clients.

How did i found out : 

I came across this link where someone discussed about this issue  > Click here

Now i am trying to use Yandex mail for free mail hosting, dont know how it will turn out. But Zoho did waste a lot of my precious time. Bad Zoho :X

Good thing is the free email service can be accessed by webmail atleast on their site. It will help some people who are happy to use online only services.