Hotmail is slowly rolling out the upgrades of the free accounts to 250mb of storage. My account was upgraded just last week and my wife’s account is yet to be upgraded. If you are patient, you shouldn’t have to pay for anything. That said, the cost is fairly minimal for the premium account.
For your gmail problems, the problem is probably because the mails are coming in with incorrect headers. Take a look at this posting for more information about encoding issues: [forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.ph … 764#241764](Chinese character display question
There’s not really a good solution to this problem with gmail because it converts everything to utf-8 encoding internally and there are no visible controls to change this. Your only option is to tell the sender that their mail program is broken, a message that is not likely to help much.
(To check whether the Content-Type header is set in gmail, when viewing the message click on “More Options” and then “Show Original”.)