Good free mildly-private email service?

[Bill Stewart]

I'm looking for a free email service that isn't linked to one of the major 
players.
I'd prefer one that doesn't make me provide my "real" email address to send 
some kind of confirmation code to (otherwise I need to string a couple of 
those together to get the amount of privacy I want.)
I don't need NSA-proof or even subpoena-proof, but I do want something 
that's not linkable to Google/Yahoo/Hotmail/OpenID/Disqus/Facebook/etc. (or 
fastmail or pobox, who I use for other services.)

I used to be able to use dodgeit.com for receive-only email, but they seem 
to be dead.

By the way, I've found one semi-convenient way to keep web-id accounts 
separate - I'm running VMware Player on my laptop, and keep separate 
virtual machines, so any conversations I have with Facebook are really 
really separate from anything else.  (I got tired of reading the news 
online and seeing different newspapers saying "Here are the articles your 
friends are reading today!".)  Some of this could be done with a chroot 
jail and/or separate Mozilla profiles, but this way I don't have to worry 
about Flash cookies or other new creative nonsense leaking around.   And it 
makes it easy to run Linux on my work Windows machine.)

	Thanks; Bill