I use my Hotmail account only as a Passport/MSN login, and have set it to only allow mails from those on my contact list, etc. Wondering why I was still getting SPAM (unsolicited commercial email) from Hotmail, I dug deeper.

The only SPAM I receive is from Hotmail, and there is no hotmail address in my contact list. It turns out that they change their “Marketing Preferences” every now and then (not all that often in my experience). When they do change the preferences, they seem to conveniently forget your previous preferences, so that you automatically become signed up for product news, etc.

Clever, eh? Almost as giving their marketing mail precedence when it comes to the SPAM settings in your account (in that they’ll always get through, regardless of your settings).

The upside of this is that I now about various MSN related products that I don’t use, nor intend to use.