Why did I get a Hotmail Account

[Kevin Lawler]

I wanted to set up as a .net passport to use messenger. I went through the
installation wizard, and it gave me a Hotmail account. It prompted me with
my e-mail address already with @hotmail already there. It is now bombarding
me with e-mails to say I have not completed the set up and I owe them
£19.99 a year, although I can use the messenger service, where as friends
and family set it up the same way, and got a @msn account and have been
using messenger for months free of charge.
Can anyone explain what I am to do, to use the messenger free of charge and
stop these e-mails coming in or I`ll end up deleting it totally.

Thanks
Kev

 

[Mark Conquer]

I think the reason for this £19.99 an year business on
hotmail is because that you can keep connected with them
longer. When you signed up for free however, I think that
you only had an period of months to use the service.
Hotmail needs money for services and they don't want
customers to pay for free now.

Mark Conquer.

 

[Andrew McDonald]

You have two options with Hotmail. Use it for free (no time limit), and get limited storage space
and some of your messages deleted to free up room every now and then. Or pay £20 a year to get extra
storage space and extra features. When you sign up for an account, you have to choose which one you
want. It looks like you chose the wrong option and opted for the paid account instead of the free
one. Of course, they make the free option harder to see at the bottom of one of the pages, because
they want more people to pay for it. So now maybe you didn't complete the paid option properly.
Contact their customer service and see if they can change your account type.

Are you sure it's explicitly saying you owe them money though? They send out advertising emails to
Hotmail accounts every month or so anyway advertising their services to encourage people to
upgrade - they often push upgrading to the paid accounts.

Thing is AFAIK, you can register any email address as a .NET passport so you didn't need to set up a
Hotmail account anyway, you could have just used your ISP email account.

Andrew

 

[Jonathan Kay [MVP]]

Greetings,

Andrew is exactly correct, however just to add, when you attempt to sign into Hotmail and see
the message about paying the £19.99, scroll down the page -- you'll see a link/button (may
have changed since I last saw it) to 'Sign up for a free 2MB' account (or something similar).
This will remove the message completely and allow you to use Hotmail.
____________________________________________
Jonathan Kay
Windows MVP, Messenger
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/
Messenger Resources - http://messenger.jonathankay.com

 

[kram]

Kevin
You obviously didn't read the questions properly as near the bottom it tells
you this is only for extra storage. May I suggest next time just take it
nice and slow when registering as they are out to get us all.