I quit paying attention to my hotmail account about 5 years ago. Switched to Yahoo mail, then last year switched to Gmail. Gmail is definitely the best thus far!
Hotmail is my junk mail folder, and basically all the things I don't want cluttering my Gmail account. And yeah it sucks. More often I can't even sign in.
Ah, yes, Hotmail. I rarely check my account there nowadays, partially because they somehow fucked up their cookie handling so it thinks my browser doesn't accept cookies (even though I've whitelisted all the domains it uses in its login process). Perhaps it's because they use HTTPS over a certificate that isn't valid so…
I'm pretty sure you can set up outlook or thunderbird to access hotmail so all your emails are stored locally. Hotmail is kind of weird about mysteriously closing down your email account for no reason.