Odd to hear that you are considered a maverick for doing so. Properly sorted into relevant folders - lots of exchanges are the history of certain events. No retyping, summarizing, silly notes needed: you have the Originals.
Obviously those dependent upon others' servers and arbitrary judgments: no longer can rely upon this method.
Small prediction then: those with the smarts to see the value in saving at least certain messages in a somewhat organized way - will be saving these on local storage / burning CDs periodically. This will take more handling time and slow access considerably. (Of course too, lock-in to a particular mail-format is the same concern here as - trusting anything permanent to any M$ format.)
As to Hotmail and M$' fruitless attempts to get people to move to the paid 'service' (0.3% so far..) -- well, what did anyone expect of M$: customer concern as a prority ?! I can't *imagine* the naivete of the ones whining about having left un-Backed-up material THERE forever.
Oh well - it's just words.
Ashton