As you probably already know, Hotmail accounts, for some unknown reasons, are not compatible with OS X Mail. I posted previously about a decent Hotmail plug-in for the Mac. But, I have been exploring another good alternative to accessing your Hotmail account with OS X Mail.
One way is to create a Gmail account (which has seamless integration with Mail), and use the Gmail Mail Fetcher. Once you have this feature active in your Gmail account, you will automatically receive any new mail from your Hotmail account. You will also benefit from Gmail's much better spam filter. And you can use IMAP in addition to POP3. And you will have several other nifty Gmail features missing from Hotmail.
A simple compromise to have the best of both worlds.
*Note: There are currently problems getting Hotmail servers to work with Mail in Snow Leopard.
