How long does Hotmail keep email?

OMG!!!!!
You are kidding, right? This person really asked this question? Oh dear. Oh d..d..d...dear. I do sincerely hope I never do business with this person. If I were ever doing business of a legal nature with anyone and they had a Hotmail (or Gmail, or yahoo Mail) address, I would run, not walk, for the nearest exit.
These e-mail addresses are toys, for convenience only.
I am truly aghast...

I have several free mail accounts, but I pay for a premium account for one of my accounts with a free mail provider, GMX.net. Does the fact that I pay for it give me more rotection than the free version of the same account? I have always assumed it would thats why I shell out a few euros evers month. But this causes me to have some doubts. I've always shied away from using the email address which comes from my internet provider as I don't want to lose my address if I change providers.

If you're concerned about having to change e-mail addresses if you change Internet providers, there's a simple solution... Get your own domain name, and create an e-mail address with that domain. You are now in control of your e-mail address. Don't like your e-mail/web provider? Change providers, and the domain name (along with e-mail addresses) comes with you.

It's amazing nowadays that I still see business cards with a their own domain name web address and a free yahoo/gmail/hotmail/whatever e-mail address.

Been using Hotmail for years. Works OK, never lost anything. I believe that Leo is correct if your email is for legal purposes, perhaps a domain name to lock your emails in place.

If you use Hotmail, then Microsoft Outlook is a good investment. Install the "Outlook Connector" plug-in, which keeps your local Outlook (.pst) file in sync with your Hotmail account. This way, if something happens to your Hotmail account, you have a local copy which can be uploaded to a new mail host. Note that you do not need to use the connector with Outlook, but it is the nicest option and works inherently with Hotmail.

Respected Sir,
I really appreciate you. Wow ! It was a great information. Thanks for your kind suggeations to people like us.

Thanks Leo; I always learn something; am an IT innocent so depend on your goodself for info. Kind regards & best wishes for the holidays.

This is an interesting problem and answers. I have email with the internet provider that I use and while away on holiday while depending on email for confirmation of trip plans they were upgrading and totally cancelled my email and internet (accidentaly??). So any incoming emails were lost.So much for the paid email servers. And a rule of thumb for me is to never email anything that I would not want the whole world to see.

You are far better off dumping all email messages asap. Far more damage has been done by disclosure of old email than by loss of it. i.e. "climategate" Actually I would like to see a free email service that guarantees they don't keep any records, backups, logs, etc. When I dump it daily it can never come back to bite me.

I use Hotmail and email provided by my ISP, both of which I download using Windows Live Mail. I use the freeware edition of MailStore to archive all my email. I then backup the archives created on my local drive to external media.

To quote from the MailStore site:

"MailStore Home enables you to backup all your email messages from multiple applications and accounts into one secure and persistent archive. Lightning-fast search, one-click backup, powerful export - all information from your email is at your fingertips anytime. Never lose important email again!"

Hopefully this will be of use to someone concerned about preserving emails.