You may have to look around for a while, but there is a way to sign up for passport on your gmail address. I know it's possible but last time I looked it was hard to find. You may want to ask Bernier, he has a non-ms email account hooked up to hotmail.

Yep, you can make a passport with non-Hotmail account. I'm going to keep using the Hotmail account with MSN Messenger so just in case I get emails at the old account, I'll notice them.

I have not logged into MSN or hotmail for a while. They have killed my account 2 or 3 times now. I don't loose my contacts, but I loose all my mail. :-|

I don't use hotmail anymore since I only signed up for it 'cause my ISP didn't have web based mail. I think now everyone has web based mail, and like you said, google has the killer app.

Hotmail is slow.
Gmail is fast.

Anybody with a brain will switch. I use the keyboard hotkeys. My hand never leaves the keyboard. I can manage my email so fast now.

Oooh, oooh! I have a brain!

I'll stick with email on my own domain. I really like this because I never have to worry about what happens to my account. I can always have it. I remember when Yahoo used to have POP3 and Forwarding, but then they took that away. Now they just give you lots of space. Although I trust google to play nice, and keep it free forever, you never really know what's going to happen. This is why i stick with using my own domain for mail. It may not have a cool interface like GMail, but I know that I will never have to change addresses again.

I think that if it came to it, I'd pay for gmail... the interface is that wonderful.

Yes. I sound arrogant. But I've had several emails killed off due to spam. Hotmail was a constant battle for years. Wasted so much time.

I use spamassassin to deal with my spam. It works quite well. In all the time I have been using it (over a year), I've gotten 1 false positive, and 95% of spam doesn't make it to my inbox. My problem with using somebody elses email address is portability. You can't take it with you if you want to leave. If GMail disappears tomorrow, then your screwed. If Gmail decides to start charging, you can change your address or leave. I've gone through 3 or 4 webmail providers and they all pull the same stunt. Give you great features to get you addicted, and then make you pay for stuff you used to get for free. I wouldn't be surprised if Google did this in a few years.

Google's mantra is "Don't be Evil". It's even on their SEC filings. If they ever pulled a stunt like that, it would be considered evil.

I know that wouldn't stop them from pulling the rug out from under us, but when you explicitly say you're not going to be evil it would be insanely stupid to be evil. Having said that, yes I do have a backup plan for email. I have domains and I pay for hosting ... I'm OK.

Just for the record, I'm not getting rid of Hotmail because "Microsoft is evil". I could care less. The Hotmail developers just fell asleep at the wheel and Gmail smoked em.

Hotmail has developers? I thought that was something Bill threw together in an afternoon. :)

I know you're kidding but just for people that don't know: Hotmail was originally independently developed and was acquired by Microsoft only a few years ago.

As part of Microsoft's push to put all of their web services under the MSN umbrella, they changed the "original" Hotmail user interface to more closely match their MSN service.

Microsoft also tried to run Hotmail from Windows XP servers instead of *nix (BSD? I'm not sure) but apparently had to rollback the deployment. I'm not sure if they ever succeeded in moving Hotmail completely over to Microsoft servers.

Kibbee's joke is still good though -- there haven't been many obvious improvements to Hotmail features in quite a while so it looks like there's no one working on it any more. But there's plenty of stuff going on under the covers that we don't know about -- especially the recent account size upgrades, which are no small task from a deployment and IT management standpoint.

A little too late I'm afraid. Gmail ate Hotmail's lunch ... and dinner.

what about second breakfast?

Gmail wasn't around for that. ;)