I’ve been using Hotmail since before it was Microsoft Hotmail. My Hotmail email address was my one constant in life. No matter where I lived, no matter where I was working, I always had Hotmail.

When I got a pop account with Mindspring I seriously considered quitting Hotmail because the free version doesn’t support forwarding to pop accounts. However, because Outlook Express came bundled with Windows 98 and XP, I was able to import my Hotmail messages into Outlook Express and export those messages to Outlook.

Vista dumped several free utilities that came with previous versions of Windows and one of those utilities was Outlook Express. Doing a little research, I learned that the only way to import Hotmail messages to Outlook was to get the Premium (AKA paid version of Hotmail’s replacement, Windows Live Messenger).

I just don’t want to buy anything more from Microsoft.

So, I’m replacing my hotmail account with Google gmail. Although I can’t set up a pop account in Outlook 2007 to get my gmail messages, I can forward gmail messages to my pop account.

Such small things: free forwarding and the ability to set up a pop account.

I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for a Microsoft Live account just to get these things but I’m probably not Microsoft’s target market either.

So, I’m curious and I’m looking for other Microsoft apps that I can replace with minimum pain and hassle.