I have had a Hotmail account since 1998. I don’t use it for anything except to log in when V makes me use the MSN Messenger protocol on Gaim because he uses MSN Messenger, or else I’ll use it if I have to give a valid email address on a site I think is likely to send me junk I don’t want or “occasionally share addresses with partners” (same thing). The only messages that go to my Inbox are those from people on my contact list, except there ARE no people on my contact list. Anyway, I sign in just often enough that the address remains valid, and it is with pleasure that I do so from my Firefox web browser with Adblock installed, running on my Linux computer. I’d almost bet the farm that MS collects the data of its users to see who’s using what browser and what OS, and it makes me grin to know that they’re aware I’m using their free email service, not viewing much less clicking their ads (though of course they don’t know that bit), making their filters sort my spam, and not running their OS. Not that one person matters in a sea of Windows/IE users, but it still makes me a bit happy. 🙂

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4