The Inbox and Sent Items folders in your default store (Outlook Today) would be used for any items received from or sent with POP3 mail accounts. Your description indicates that you have only a Hotmail account. Messages sent through Hotmail should be in its Sent Items folder, IIRC (but I haven't used it in years, so I could be mistaken).

Hotmail, however, cannot support the special Outlook folders like Contacts and Calendar. That is why you need both a default store that can handle those folders and a Hotmail proxy PST to handle the Hotmail mail, which uses a completely different protocol than a POP3 mail account would.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.turtleflock.com/olconfig/index.htm
and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
http://www.outlookcode.com/jumpstart.aspx

"Peter Barrett" wrote in message ...
Sue

Thanks for getting back to me.

Can I ask a further question please? What is the relationship between the
Inbox and the Sent Items folders in the Outlook Today directory with those in
the Hotmail directory.

The Inbox in the Outlook Today folder is empty and does not seem to be
populated as I receive messages at Hotmail.

The Sent Items folder that is part of the Outlook Today folder does contain
some of the items in my Hotmail Sent Items folder - but not all of them. Do
items sent using Outlook appear in this folder - but if they are sent using
the Hotmail application they do not appear in this folder? What are the rules
and what is the logic behind them?