As some of you will know I have been on an extended trip over the last few weeks. I took a small laptop with me to check for any urgent mail and found that while I could receive hotmail emails I could not reply to them - the thing stalled once I pressed the send key. I was able to get round it with web mail on
mail2web.com - Pick Up Your Email but still it was an irritation I could have done without.
I also tried to find free wifi in various airport locations including Vancouver, Los Angeles, Auckland and Sydney - the only one that was free was Hong Kong. Charges were not high but I was not content with being bombarded with adverts on the paid connections! And HK was free of any overhead at all.