Has anyone had first-hand experience of subscribing to a Hotmail account that does not delete after thirty days?

It is possible that I might lose all my messages (400) approx. if I fail to log in to a hotmail account that I have held for 7 years.

Is there any way around this problem?

login?

Yes; Login however; if I were not able to 'login' in a 30 day period I would lose those valuable messages and email addresses etc.

The only alternative is to pay by credit card a fee to Microsoft so my account (should) not expire.

Are there any alternatives?

Is it possible to save all my emails and put them on CD?

It is possible that I might lose all my messages (400) approx. if I fail to log in to a hotmail account that I have held for 7 years.

Yes it's very possible...so maybe you should sign up for a Yahoo email..not only do they give you 1 Gigabyte of storage space but the time between sign in's is 3 months..

Or you could try a Gmail account.

Hotmail

If keeping the account name that you have had for 7 years and all the messages intact is of prime importance, and you are going to be away from computers and communication for more than a month, I'd suggest the upgrade and paying them the $20 per year.

You will get a huge mailbox, and POP access. The POP access will allow you to configure an email client such as Outlook Express to check the hotmail account automatically, along with any other email accounts you might have. I pay the $20 / yr to hotmail and yahoo just for this convenient and time saving feature, which checks all my accounts with a single click of the mouse.

Alternatively, it is easy enough to copy and paste all the messages you want to keep into MS Word.

Nothings for free,

Advertisers can't sell product if no one is looking at them,

As mentioned, make it a ritual to login into all your free accounts (Hotmail, Yahoo), or pony up and pay the chomp change to maintain an active account,

I pay $4.95 a month for a AOL pop account that I use solely as a back-up archive, (I always cc a copy there and access it only via the web, AOL doesn't live on my machine, it's their stripped down mail only package, 1gig storage),

2711 MB with gmail and you don't have to login periodically.

Has anyone had first-hand experience of subscribing to a Hotmail account that does not delete after thirty days?

It is possible that I might lose all my messages (400) approx. if I fail to log in to a hotmail account that I have held for 7 years.

Is there any way around this problem?

Why don't you set up outlook express?

It works in conjunction with hotmail, and you can ttransfer all your messages to folders, which are stored on your hard disc and you can acess them offline. Been using it for years and found it very good.

why are people so reluctant to give up hotmail when its full of crap? just switch to gmail or yahoo mail.

Why don't you set up outlook express?

AFAIK, for several years now the free mail services including hotmail don't allow you to do this. You have to pay for their premium service to hook up and download via POP3. Not only is it a bandwidth issue for them, more importantly you aren't looking at their ads anymore.

Use an e-mail client like Eudora,

then you will have the e-mail messages on your own machine for reference.

You can prepare replies off-line and then simply connect to the internet

for a few minutes to upload the replies and download new messages.