Hotmail was down for over two hours Thursday Sep 8, 2011

hotmail seems to be going up and down and even when up, after the login screen it tells me live.mail.com not found.

So I am thinking mail for many, including myself, will be spotty at best.

Same issue here. I've sort of got used to Live Mail telling me it cannot connect to yahoo mail. But at the moment it's the only one it can connect to!

Finally back I think.

It even made the front page of the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455

And when it comes back.......

No one has emailed you !

I stopped using Hotmail in the late 90's specifically because I could never count on it being up and running. It was frequently down for "maintenance" or just the hell of it.

I've never used Hotmail as my primary email program but I keep it as a handy back up place for some emails I want to keep but don't want to leave in my main email program.

Well the nice thing about web-based mail is that you can reference it even if you are at someone else's computer.

I notice they didn't mention it but even www.msn.com was down for a short period but it was back up by the time I posted my issue here about hotmail.

It was probably the U.S. government testing some of their plans to take control of the internet if they feel the need. Let me go get some tin foil, I need a bigger hat.

"Well the nice thing about web-based mail is that you can reference it even if you are at someone else's computer."

I think this came up before. I can only speak for the country in which I live, but here, all the ISPs, who also all have Email facilities, have a means of accessing your mail boxes direct from that ISP. I use Live mail to access other mail services, sucjh as Microsoft's, otherwise I would have no need for any "third party" software.
Obviously, from reading threads such as this, it is not the case elswhere?

Yes I too, can access my ISPs mail via their website but then just like hotmail it is handled and treated like web-based mail. Later when I get home and open outlook it downloads it and it is removed from my ISPs servers.

But in 10 years I have had 4 or 5 different ISPs while my hotmail address has stayed the same. Plus I maintain 3 different hotmail accounts so that, for example, my subscriptions never go to the same as my bank account.