I don't care if "not everyone agrees". Their boundary is incredibly low. It is literally a Dark UI Pattern. I bet your own boundary is higher than that.

No-true-Scotsman? I don't care, this one is valid: we're talking about someone who has some distant relatives in Scotland, but never set a foot there, hardly speaks English, and lives in China.

I do get that the proper threshold is not allays the same. The threshold of consent for having sex for instance, is very high (or ought to be). Still, some things I say over email are just as private as my dick.

OK, but we're not talking about email here, we're talking about webmail in particular. I mean, it's rather foolish to think that you can trade MS's private IP over MS's free-as-in-beer webmail service when they explicitly tell you they're not willing to tolerate that in the TOS. Now if it were MS hacking into someone else's mailserver in pursuit of their stolen IP, I'd fully agree with you.

Yes, it is foolish, even if like everybody else, you haven't read the TOS. I know the analogy is unfair, but it is also very foolish for young women to dress lightly, then go walk out alone in dark streets. Yet sometimes, circumstances are such that people do it anyway, and it doesn't mean they're "asking for it". Drunk after a party? Used to using "your" webmail for all your communications?

People often do foolish things, it doesn't mean other people have a moral right to take advantage of them. (Alas, they sometimes have the legal right.)

By the way, in this case, it seems Microsoft spied on the blogger's account, to know where the leak came from. The leaker may not have used hotmail at all. While it's easy to notice cloud spying when sending from a webmail, it is a bit less easy when you send to a webmail: you're not even legally expected to have read the TOS. I mean, you still have to be careless to make that blunder, just less so.