but I've no trouble having Thunderbird pick up my gmail messages for me and displaying them in TB.

I'm in the middle of fixing up an problem in Outlook.com for an older friend due to the predatory processes of Microsoft. She's not computer literate and has had a Hotmail account for years (now called Live mail) and while trying to access her mail on the new laptop her daughter bought for her the laptop's hover = click on this kicked in and she got automatically updated to Outlook.com. Now this shouldn't have been an issue, but the auto update also gave her an automatic account with MS Messenger and about half the screen is set aside for MSN and ads, leaving little for the mail. The horrid side of this is the fact that after a week of digging around on the site I can NOT find anyway to undo this (and I use the term extremely loosely) upgrade and return to the standard Hotmail/Live mail service.

The results of the above is I no longer recommend either service to anyone, unless they want a free email they'll never check or one they'll only check through another mail client. In those two cases I recommend Gmail, but I recently had a report back that another friend couldn't create a Gmail account because the system did not like the 8 character password they had - the only one they can remember (another golden oldie) so it refused to continue the account creation process until he made up a password it would accept - result was he went off and opened a Yahoo mail account.

Summary - both the current Gmail and Outlook.com are garbage in both design, and choice of colours.