If, like me, you have had a Hotmail account for years, and you don't want to change it just to sign up, do what I did. Sign up to another free email service (I used Gmail) and set up the new account to forward incoming mail to your Hotmail account. Any mail sent to the new account then appears in your inbox in Hotmail as if it was sent directly. It should take about 10 minutes to set up. Just remember to check the terms of the email provider - you may need to log in to the new account once a month to show it's being used.