Why does Hotmail (and Yahoo! as well) serve up it's pages as ISO-8859-1? If I send an email to a Hotmail account, and my email is encoded as UTF-8, Hotmail is able to properly decode my email (I send it encoded using quoted-printable to fool any 7-bit MTAs on the way) but when it serves up the content, it comes back telling my browser that it's encoded as "iso-8859-1"1, which means anything outside of US-ASCII is garbage.
Why, oh, why, in this internationally-aware day and age, do they still use a non-Unicode encoding? I mean, if it's really such a hassle to convert their site to UTF-8, then the least they could do, surely, is convert my emails from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1! I'd much rather have unknown characters show up as ?'s than have to tell my users to "Click on the View menu, then on Encoding then on Unicode (UTF-8) to be able to view this email properly" - especially since it looks OK for everybody not using Hotmail (or Yahoo)
The only thing I can think of for people who want to use a web-based email client is to switch to Gmail, which serves up their pages as UTF-8 at least. Not only that, but if you send a gmail user an email encoded as something else (e.g. iso-8859-1) it'll automatically convert it to utf-8 before serving it up! Nice work, gmail!
1 Actually, I have a feeling it doesn't tell the browser any such thing, and the browser just uses the default defined by the standard...