Lost All My iPhone Contacts When Trying To Sync

New to iPhones. Downloaded iTunes, tried to sync with computer and lost my phone contacts. I found out I needed Outlook or Outlook Express to sync contacts. I also found out that I can't use Hotmail. So what do you suggest I do?

The problem is I live full time in a motorhome with my own internet system on the roof. This gives me a Dynamic IP address.

Can I use my internet system to setup Oulook or something else to be able to combine my iPhone contacts with e-mail contacts?

I have never had Outlook. I sync my contacts to Yahoo.

-----

I sync to Gmail. One gotcha, is that if you change your Gmail password and forget to change it in iTunes you won't get a warning - it just won't sync. Then when you remember to change it in iTunes it still won't sync unless you trick it by changing or adding a contact. It took me quite some time to figure this out due to the lack of an error message.

-----

I'll try Gmail or Yahoo to sync to iTunes. I hope this works.

-----

You can have Hotmail forward to Gmail. That way you still get all your email. Over time Gmail is probably the better choice as their contact list can be directly synced to the iPhone.

-----

GMail now has migrate options for all 'older' web mail platforms (AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) they will import contacts, calendars, all saved mail and continue to retrieve mail until you disable it if you like.

I missed the original question but your contacts should be backed up somewhere, either restore an older iPhone backup (temporarily in order to sync the contacts elsewhere) or find where they are stored online.

In the process of testing iCloud I turned on contact syncing and iCloud was importing Google contacts then Google was importing iCloud and pretty soon I had 20 copies of everything - thank goodness Google lets you restore your contacts to any point in time so I easily restored them...