And receiving hotmail (or any outher webmail) using scraping
techniques is a daunting task, to say the least - you should
forget about that IMHO.
There's a perl project called "gotmail" that will do the scraping
to dump in a local mailbox file (I don't remember whether it's MH
or mbox format). You can snag it at
http://gotmail.sf.net
Thus, there's evidence that Hotmail can be scraped, but it seems
they have a never-ending battle against Hotmail, trying to keep
up with changes.
I don't know of any Python projects doing the same sort of thing.
It might not be too hard to port the Perl project over to
Python, but one would be an extra level removed from scraping
Hotmail, playing catchup not only with Hotmail, but then porting
the latest fixes from Gotmail.
There are a couple other Hotmail-to-mbox scrapers I've heard of,
but haven't tried.
-tkc