* To all my friends who have received the SPAM mails recently, I apologies profusely.

It's quite annoying when you receive SPAM from one of your own email addresses.  In my case, it was [email protected].

It's an address I registered and used way-back-when - and hasn't seen me using it for the last 5-6 years.

Anyhow, I logged onto it, and tried to close my account.  However, I could not do so as there was a 'billing account linked to your Live ID.'  I was advised to goto https://billing.microsoft.com to resolve this issue.

However, on landing at https://billing.microsoft.com - I was greeted with a message to say "This Live ID does not have a billing relationship with Microsoft.  Please Click Here to join.

Silly Microsoft.

Anyhow, I phoned their customer support... three different numbers I was passed between til ending up with some Hotmail specific department.  I spent over an hour on the phone in total, and finally ended up with the support guy passing an email onto someone else to take a look.

The best thing about it - the guy set a gmail.com address as the reply-to: address.

I thought I'd ask him a few questions and get him to give me some advice on hotmail versus gmail.  He duly obliged, telling me to goto google.com and sign up there 'or something like that.'

Yeah.. bear this in mind when you next choose a Webmail provider.