I have had a Hotmail account for about ten years, that I use for communicating with family members and that I try to keep free of all else. It worked for me just fine until Microsoft switched everything over to Outlook. The new interface is (to me, anyway) incredibly cluttered and counter-intuitive. I couldn't use it.
So I searched for free e-mail clients, and settled on a German service called GMX. I established a GMX account (free), and then configured GMX to retrieve messages from Hotmail. Setting that up was pretty transparent -- it had to be, or I couldn't have done it. Works great, and when creating new messages to send it allows me to chooses either my Hotmail address or my GMX address.
But I don't recall ever getting any requests for further contact info from Microsoft. Are you sure it's not from a bogus site, on a phishing expedition? No e-mail requests, but I HAVE received a number of phone calls from obvious (from the poor connections and amount of background noise) third world sweatshops claiming to be from some computer repair service, calling to repair "the problem with your computer." I just hang up on them.
