re Hotmail - I don't think you can get a Hotmail address any more, but Microsoft are rolling out new domains: live.<country> and (recently) outlook.com. For example, I got a live.ie address because I'm in Ireland.
However, as an email provider, Microsoft has one major flaw: they don't like
IMAP and don't offer it on free accounts. They prefer that you use their MAPI (Exchange) protocol, which is fine if you use Outlook on a Windows PC, since they have a "Hotmail Connector" for that. For someone like me, using Thunderbird on a Linux system, it's either the old POP protocol (which just downloads mail) or the webmail page.