How can I free myself of Hotmail's chains?

Factual Questions
21

Access Hotmail with Outlook Express. Presto!

22

I am not an avid hotmail user (I keep an account for testing purposes) and I just noticed this “problem” this week when one of our email hosting clients complained that we were somehow messing with his links in email (what??)

Hotmail parses the links before you get them, so right-click “Open in a new window” doesn’t work. The link changes from:



<a href=http://mylink.com>My Link</a>

to something like this:



<a href=http://12.34.56.78/hotmail/cgi/bullcrap/etc/etc/?http://mylink.com target=stupidnewframedwindow>My Link</a>

That is, the actual HTML of the email changes from the first format to the second.

There’s no getting around it unless you don’t open your mail from a Hotmail/MSN webmail interface. Try outlook as daffyduck suggests (although I am not sure if that’s available with the free Hotmail accounts).

23

Isn’t that going to be charged for soon?

24

If you’re using Internet Explorer, you can use this thingy I wrote.

25

I’ve never understood why the “default” free email everyone has seems to be Hotmail. Yahoo is also free, now has 100MB of space, and is so much better in every respect. I’ve never had a Hotmail account, but have three Yahoo ones.

26

Seems like I’m the last one but I finally got my 250Mb upgrade this afternoon. I wonder how they organized who got it when? I’ve been actively using Hotmail for at least 7 years.