I have more than a decade old email addresses on hotmail and yahoo. Have email addresses for on gmail for the last few years. Gmail has a very fast interface while the new and the old interface of yahoo are relatively slow. New interface of yahoo has some glitches. While hotmail is the worst ever, I never check emails on it and hardly use the live messenger anymore since I use yahoo messenger gtalk normally.
Just as an added information, more than MS Outlook Mozilla Thunderbird is better. I have used it for my official emails at office and its simply awesome. (I know here the discussion is about outlook.com and not MS outlook)