A hotmail account that still downloads for free to OE?

I recently set up Thunderbird for a friend to use for her email (her local ISP email, that is). She also has a couple of Hotmail accounts, which she wanted to download using TB as well. I told her that as far as I knew, that was a pay service now (downloading to a POP3 account). In fact, I could not get Thunderbird to do it. Oddly, though, one of her two email addresses will, in fact, still download using OE. It's a relatively new computer, so this isn't some quirk left over from some old setup, though she says the hotmail account itself is an "old" one.
This is just a matter of curiosity for me, but has anyone else ever had this experience? Could it be that older accounts, for some reason, are still downloadable to POP3 accounts?
I know that with Yahoo, for instance, some things are "grandfathered in" when rules change - passwords now have to be a minimum of a certain number of letters/digits (something more than four at present). But when I set up my Yahoo account 5 years ago, four characters were sufficient, and I've never had to update that password to conform to the new rule.
[Incidentally, she's apparently been able to download email from that particular hotmail account using OE all along - on her previous computer as well as her new one.]

 

Yes, I've seen it happen. Apparently when Hotmail went to pay for POP3, it didn't get it done completely.

 

There was a legacy. Accounts created and in continuous use and setup for pop access prior to the change retain the ability .
New accounts do not.

 

Aha, so that explains it! Thanks, Pete!