Although hotmail doesn't like it, you can use Outlook or Outlook Express for your hotmail email, with POP3 protocol, and if you do that your address book is on your own machine where it won't go away in the unlikely [pause to laugh hysterically] possibility that hotmail screws up.

Messages that you receive in the hotmail area in OE (and I assume in Outlook) remain on the server and can disappear, but if you use OE Edit|Move (Right clik, Move to) and put them in the "Local Machine" space, they are saved in folders (.dbx file format with OE) on your machine.

You can then backup messages by copying the entire "email" folder elsewhere. You restore from the backup by "File | Import | messages."

The address book is a .wab file that can be saved by copying the file, or by using File|Export to send the addy book elsewhere for archiving. (If you want to move from OE to Outlook, as an example, you need to export the addy book in .CSV format, which Outlook - and probably other email/browser programs - can import.

The same address book that OE or Outlook uses can be "called up" in any Office program for addressing snail mail or for other forms of correspondence if you choose to use the feature. Of course if you let Outlook/OE automatically add addys to the address book when you open emails, most of the entries won't contain anything but the email address, so you do have to fill in the blanks to make it all usefull for the other applications.

If you use only "browser email" as hotmail prefers there's no known good way to backup either messages or address book locally.

John