Free cloud mail hosting for Education?

Looking for a cloud-based mail solution for Education sector, that is reliable, robust, well-featured? And of course low-cost. Well, how about free? Both Microsoft and Google have free mail-hosting services for Education/Academic customers (eg Schools, Colleges, Universities, etc). Both offer their enterprise-class services for free to eligible customers:

• Microsoft: Office 365/Exchange Online. Lots of free stuff (probably enough features for most), but you can pay extra for more. Sign-up is quite easy, based on .edu.au domain name. (The link provided is to the Australian service.)
• Google: Google Apps for Education. Totally free, same as business/enterprise features. Requires a bit more work to sign-up when I used it (perhaps because it is US-based).

If I get more time, I may try to outline some of the key differences between the free versions.