I have used hotmail as my primary email since 97, I started out as an msn dial up customer and got the hotmail and msn email addies, I use the hotmail daily. I am now with Verizon fios which also has msn so I still have all my msn addies. I also have the msn browser which I love to use to view my hotmail. I have not tried the hotmail live since I like the one I have so well. My other fave is using gmail through mozilla thunderbird. Works super good and no ads at all plus all the good points of gmail and the ease of thunderbird and of course there are add ons for thunderbird just like for firefox. If you already have a gmail account I would say try downloading and setting up thunderbird to get your gmail and use it. The directions to do that are on the gmail site under the settings tab, using Pop and Imap, thunderbird's new version is supposed to be set up following the imap directions. It is very simple. You can then have your full address book and it will fetch all your mail for you. Here is a link that might be useful: thunderbird

Just thought I'd add a couple of things after doing some research. It looks like if I want to be able to right click on a photo and use the "Send to e-mail recipient" option, I have to sign in to Windows Live Mail. Then, it takes away all my regular contacts and leaves me with only those for the Windows Hotmail account that I'm forced to sign into. If I sign out, I get them back, but cannot use the right click method to send photos. Am I just too stupid to figure out the simple solution to this or is Microsoft just forcing us into this position? Windows 7, IE 9

I too like my privacy and was amazed that this is possible without opting in. Based on your post I went to Photos/Options/People tagging. There it showed that I was allowing others to view but I dragged the pointer down to "Just me" and saved, now these are not visible to others. Then I went to Options/Privacy/Advanced and see other things to be edited to control my privacy. Remember to save after changing of course. Here is the info on deleting your photo. You might find one or two other snippets of interest there for Skydrive. I found this after writing the first part of my reply.

I have had an account at inbox.com for years in fact I was one of the first accounts there, just one thing to remember there is that you must keep it active because if it goes a long time with no activity they can delete it but they usually do send you an email warning to which ever other email address you provided. My other suggested email that is really big and nice is gmx.com they have a great active forum and answer the questions and help suggestions right away. You can fetch your other mail through it also including hotmail. The link to gmx.com below is the best link to use to access your email there, it is the https secure link and if you notice up at the top next to the login button is one that says no popup, you can use that one to log in and it will open it in a new tab rather than a new window which is what I prefer. You can set up different sounds to alert you to new mail and you can change the colors too. Here is a link that might be useful: gmx secure no popup