fopen() and Hotmail.com

I've been trying to get rid of the crappy Hotmail interface by creating a php script to download my mail for me. However, for some vague reason I am unable to connect to the hotmail.com webserver. Here's some of the code (lines 15 & 16): $url = "http://lc1.law5.hotmail.passport.com./cgi-bin/dologin?username=<myusername> &passwd=<mypassword>"; $hotmail = fopen($url, "r"); And this is the error message: Warning: fopen("http://lc1.law5.hotmail.passport.com./cgi-bin/dologin?username=xxxxxx x&passwd=xxxxxxx","r") - No error in e:\apache\htdocs\hotmail.php4 on line 16 Connecting to other websites (even microsoft.com) does work, but any connection to hotmail.com fails (even plain http://www.hotmail.com/). Copy pasting the URL from the script in IE results in displaying my inbox, so I fail to understand why php cannot do that. I would be very gratefull for any suggestions or tips.