I remember when my mother in law complained about getting spams, and a lot of spams daily in her free mail provider I told her to get her new email account in gmail. I guess she is happy now that she did it.
Gmail becomes the most popular free email provider today, besides Yahoo or Hotmails. The reason is it has a very clean interface, and less of spams.
And because of this, a lot of people also want to set their gmail accounts as their default email.