Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. My non-serious-mail-from-friends account is on hotmail, and it's as good as gmail, a bit better in some stuff and a bit worse in others.
+ Your contacts are easily exportable
- Non-webmail access: exchange-push protocol for smart phones, POP3 (aka Inbox-only), Outlook/OutlookExpress-only access (using, I presume, private APIs).
- If you decide to move your identity off of hotmail, you can't disable spam filtering, which combined with basically POP3-only access means you are forced to login to check you spam folder. At least with Gmail/GoogleApps you can use IMAP to automatically check/sync your spam folder, even though you can't turn off the filtering. The only plus here is that you can dial down the spam filter slightly, which you can't do on Google.
- Since access is POP3 only, the only way to export all of your email is to move all of it into your Inbox and pull it down (or alternate between moving a folder in and pulling it down, then sorting it on the other end back into folders).
There are three (or 4) areas of action links on the page, to ensure that I never remember where the print button or Reply all button is.
It regularly junks emails from lists I'm subscribed to, apparently hitting "not junk" is not enough to mark it safe for next time?
The login page has a session that can expire - if I haven't logged in within five minutes of opening the login page, I get thrown backwards again for session expiration. Sometimes I consider not bothering attempting to re-log in.
Perhaps I've just been spoilt by Gmail.
I hope you're joking. Live Mail (which subsumed Hotmail) is atrocious, the interface sucks. Live Mail also doesn't do a good job of catching spam.
The only thing worse I've used interface-wise is Yahoo! Mail.
To give credit where it's due, the spam filtering has improved dramatically. I've used my hotmail account as a utility email account for at least ten years. I get several hundred spams a week. They are close to 100% in filtering accuracy for me but YMMV. The only problems I've had is that spammy things I've signed up for can be filtered the first time in.