Vlk,
I will always bow to your judgement in these matters.
However, I retrieve my email from Hotmail all day every day (as do others I support) using Thunderbird. Ah, you are about to say, you are using an http screenscraper. Well, no we are not. We all have WebDav enabled Hotmail accounts and we are all using the WebDav interface to retrieve and send mail as supported by the Thunderbird Webmail extensions.
Thunderbird is in your "scan http" list and it works just fine - not a problem since the day you added it to your list.