This sure sounds close to the hotmail plus service I now pay $19.95 for.
We used to use MSN as our ISP, and when we went to SBC/Yahoo DSL, I transferred my wife's msn.com email domain address to hotmail plus. We just open Outlook, it looks for a hotmail server, authenticates, then downloads/uploads.
I'll be pretty irritated if Mr. Softy cranks what I currently have up to $59.95. I really don't need any additional features that are proposed for the new subscription price.