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Use Thunderbird with GMail and configure it so that every time there's a new message it is synced to your local hard drive but also left on the server (IMAP probably though I think the same can be done with POP).

My linux box at home has been doing this for years, I just leave Thunderbird open and set my monitor to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. I don't care if my GMail and college mail accounts temporarily go down, it's all mirrored on that machine.

Anti-Microsoft zealot bonus rant: I stopped using Hotmail when I realized I could not access it outside of Outlook Express ... I'm aware of ways around this but there's a simpler solution: don't use Hotmail. This and the fact that (last I checked) it didn't support forwarding are two very good reasons to move on to a free mail service more dedicated to you. The choice is yours.

I've seen the shift of a lot of non-serious non-real-time discussions to sites such as Facebook. I find this rather irritating because I only get a notification email in my regular Inbox informing me to go check Facebook instead of the message itself. I also can't archive and refer to old messages which may have event information, phone numbers, etc. due to the lack of advanced features on those sites. I understand this method of logging in generates ad revenue for the site, but when I'm on the road I'd like to respond via push-email in my down-time instead of having to find a public wifi access point.

Although I'm sure this will violate Facebook's TOS in some way, an existing project like FreePOPS or a server-side daemon could be modified to fetch messages in my Facebook and Myspace inboxes and move them to my regular email account. Then they could be pushed to my phone and archived in my local email application.

Facebook needs to consider allowing POP/IMAP access to the inbox and only allow messages to be sent to other Facebook members via the same method. Facebook already forces verification of accounts via college email addresses or via mobile phone text messages which helps cut down spam and viruses. This allows a very large white-list of sorts with a global address book. With more businesses becoming present in the Facebook world, legitimate corporate advertising could be allow/blocked simply by altering account privacy settings. I see it as a win-win for Facebook.

Beside the mentioned Webmail extension http://webmail.mozdev.org/ you could also try FreePOPs http://www.freepops.org/ which basically is an easily extendable Webmail scraper delivering the goodies with POP3.

Disclaimer: I never tried any of those.

The Tb Webmail extension is very limited, it only does Yahoo, Hotmail, Lycos (Europe), MailDotCom, Gmail, Libero and AOL. FreePOPs does a lot more webmail providers, it works with any client (localhost proxy), and if your provider is so exotic that it isn't supported you can write a small extension in LUA.

I had a client who wanted me to do that. We managed to get Thunderbird to download new email from Hotmail, but getting the old stuff out via Outlook Express or Outlook was nearly impossible.

Did you try FreePops?

Solutions:

1. open a Yahoo Mail on another domain (yahoo.ca or yahoo.in)
2. use FreePOPs

Maybe http://www.freepops.org/ can do the job. It works for Yahoo and Hotmail, maybe it will work for Windows Live Mail too.

Like FreePOPs. You can have your Windows Live Mail and POP3, too!

I guess I should have mentioned that this program has lots of other plugins, including AOL, GMail, Hotmail, Juno, Lycos, etc.

You can use FreePops with the Yahoo plugin to avoid manually using the webmail interface.

You can use FreePops with the Yahoo plugin to avoid manually using the webmail interface.

I've never had a problem with hotmail in either mozilla or firefox, however i use freepops (http://www.freepops.org/) to check my hotmail account. (and my mail.com account)