No particular problems here in Kansas.

Our MSN account delivered a half-dozen mails a couple of minutes ago when I checked. My hotmail account hasn't dropped anything new for a couple of days, but that's normal (I don't have many friends - who mail me); and we haven't had any notices of bad connections.

MSN has been "migrating" both MSN and hotmail accounts to new "Vista ready" servers recently, so it is possible that they're doing a server swap on people in some areas. They usually don't tell you anything about it unless you catch them in the process and complain. Then they pretend it's your fault and they'll "help you" get it straightened out.

Usually just ignoring it for a day or two is as effective as their help... ... .

If you've recently created a new account on your machine, a couple of rather trivial looking things can prevent making the connection without giving a useful error message. One of the most common is failing to check the box for "secure authentication required" in the account setup. Both MSN and hotmail accounts generally require it (at least on our accounts), and sometimes the setup Wizard seems to skip past it and the box doesn't pop up in obvious form during account setup. For some reason, if that box is unchecked, you often don't get a connection but don't get an intelligible error message.

A bad password or mis-typed account name usually gets a fairly clear error message (at least in our experience).

John