Re: Stop moaning it's free
Because their competitors also offer a free service that doesn't go down nearly as often?
Been a Hotmail user since pre-2000 (no idea how far before that, but definitely before that). Was a GMail user within minutes of them offering the service and forwarded all my accounts and not looked back. Still technically have a Hotmail account but never use it - they break the interface in Opera about once a year or more (usually by some duff CSS that tries to "detect" old Opera and cut stuff out, but just breaks new Opera versions) and take a month or two to fix it, their support is atrocious, and they have will only suggest to use IE to browse the site - I just keep it for the other Live account services (Messenger - which I'm being forced onto Skype from, and some games force you to have Live, etc.).
They are trying hard to shove me onto Outlook.com, which I don't want, and for years they played games with people who wanted to use POP3/IMAP to access their inboxes (still might, as far as I know). GMail offer a better service, for the same price, and I haven't had an outage there yet (not saying there have been none, but none that I've noticed), and they don't try to shove me between projects all the time for no reason. And their UI doesn't break, they don't change it on a whim every six months, and even when they do I have enough control to get rid of the junk and/or just suck the mail into my own mail reader.
At one time I was paying for Hotmail Plus or whatever it was called. I ended up cancelling it before GMail even existed because I just wasn't getting enough for my money compared to other companies offering the same services.
And now I do most of my own email in-house, and don't have problems. Downtime is rarer than anything I've used commercially and I can still suck in my GMail if need be. Haven't bothered looking into sucking in my Hotmail as the junk mail filter on it is atrocious and a 13+ year-old account is still being spammed by people with hundreds of consecutive usernames in the To: field and Hotmail just let it through all the time.
Free is a price. Value for money is defined by perceived value of services divided by price. The maths breaks on zero, but assuming an infinitesimally small number is very close to zero and substituting, that still means that GMail and even my own hosting on servers I already have can offer better value for money than Hotmail.
A dog turd can be free. It doesn't mean I wouldn't rather have a free three-course banquet.