Waste of money IMO. If you want a short email address, there are free alternatives enough. If you want to pay for your email, at least do it decently and use an own domainname.
And as said, Hotmail is the last email supplier I would use as primary email address. Yahoo has its flaws but their interface is better, they store sent emails automatically, they have no ridiculously short inactivity limit, there is no storage limit... And then Gmail is even better when it comes to interface IMO, and allows you free accounts with your own domain regged elsewhere (which Hotmail also does, but then Gmail is a lot more trustworthy)
I would not spend a penny on a @us.com (or @eu.com in my case) email address if it is run by a provider I have no full 100% trust in.
If you want to pay for your email, check out
www.eumx.net (really fast and really good and with great support) and
www.safe-mail.net (no cookie usage which I like a lot, and a great interface). Must add that I was lucky to get a free EuMX account through a special promotion once, however they are really good and I would happily pay for a service like that. But for Hotmail, no... If you want to pay for email that's fine, but there are way better options available then.
dave9713 said:
You can get better email addresses than that at Mail.com in my opinion... free aswell!
But that's even worse than Hotmail... The story is well-known of two people having the same username at mail.com, their system somehow didn't notice that a specific email address already existed and so 2 people used the same email address for a while. It is a miracle they never logged in to find each other's mailbox and read private correspondance of a total stranger... Very big mistake for a mail provider. Although their geographical domains are kinda nice.