Does anyone know of a (free) e-mail service such as gmail etc which uses ms outlook?

thanks.

You can configure outlook to use all 3rd party email accounts like hotmail/gmail etc

There will be usually be a webpage on the 3rd party site explaining how to set up outlook to synchronise with it.

One thing to check beforehand - do you want to still keeping access to ALL your emails online as well ? Default, will 'pull' all your emails to outlook, whilst not keeping them in your actual hotmail account if you see what I mean. 

There's a box under the properties tab somewhere saying 'keep all emails on server' or words to that effect. Prudent to tick it.

If they use a pop/smtp server, with password authentication, it would be hard to stop it.

Don't use Outlook use Windows Live Mail