Many people on this site wouldn't touch Hotmail with the proverbial bargepole. There have been far too many reports of the servers being inaccessible, passwords not being accepted and stored mail lost. Gmail is generally regarded as being far better.
My own choice though is to use Gawab. It's a reliable, free (and advert-free) email service, which can be accessed either via the web or through an email client (such as Outlook Express). See paragraph 3, et seq, of my post here, to find out how to create a Gawab account:
http://www.theanswerb...t/Question407429.html
Chris