Really, I am furious right now. I wanted to use another term rather than suck (one which rhymes with suck) but I realise some people can be offended by profanity so I rowed back on the language.
Why am I annoyed? - Microsoft’s insistence that you have to log into Hotmail every 30 days or they delete all your info. I don’t use Hotmail much, but I have had my Hotmail account for years and there was tons of old email info in there. I logged in today (after obviously more than 30 days) and I find all my info has been deleted by Microsoft.
Why impose such a shortsighted policy of deleting people’s info after 30 days when your main competitors (Yahoo! and Gmail) don’t have any such policies as far as I know.
Serves me right for trusting Microsoft with my information online, I guess! I won’t make that mistake in a hurry again.
Update: - I notice as well that my account has been downgraded from 250mb to 2mb! Insult to injury.
Gmail deletes the entire account after 9 months. That I can understand, but 30 days is far too short.
Andrew, thanks for stopping by and commenting.
Another important difference between Gmail and Hotmail’s policies is that with Gmail you can log in using POP - I have my email client app polling Gmail every 30 minutes for new mail. Consequently, I am unlikely to ever fall foul of the Gmail 9 month rule - I would have done the same with my Hotmail account except you have to pay Microsoft for that privilege.
I think we need to create a new website. For the greater good of the community: StopTomFromSayingFuck.com
Yahoo’s policy is to disable an email account after 3 or 4 months of inactivity. But I think they keep your email around longer, you just need to re-register and say you’re still interested in keeping the account. I’m sure they delete the mail after 6 months or something like that.
Erm.. I do the same, Tom, and, as far as I can remember, always have.. with my Hotmail account.
Bah.. no I don’t.. it’s a HTTP server.. oops.
It’s still on my polling list though.
peteb,
as far as I know you can only get access to Hotmail Plus using POP - this is a paid service.
The free service from Hotmail doesn’t have a POP interface - unlike the free Gmail service. Unless you know something I don’t?
No.. you’re right, Tom. I have the Plus for the storage and attachments options.. and admittedly it’s been a while since I upgraded the account, but I don’t actually remember a time when I didn’t have the polling option available.. perhaps that was changed for the free version when the newer accounts were launched? [that's just a guess btw]
Let me say it for you: Microsoft, You F@#$!
When I discovered my account erased, I was ticked off too. When will Microsoft get the idea that they have to give and give freely in orde to win goodwill of the people, which is worth much much more than simply dollars and cents. Gmail is more open about it, giving us the ability to not only access our mail via POP, but also to export our Gmail contact list. That’s more realistic, especially for the long run. Darn it, don’t trap your users!
once upon a time, hotmail was on Solaris. And all was well. Then Redmond bought it up and migrated it to IIS and yea, the screams were heard throughout the known world (since Hotmail was pretty much it back then…)
nothing’s changed I see.
Does Outlook Express still have HTTP access to Hotmail? It used to… very slow over dialup though, which is what was available the last time I looked at it.
Umm….does anyone actually use hotmail anymore? I just have it for the memories when I used to use dial up. Ahh the good old days…
A way of getting around having your email deleted would be to use your hotmail account with MSN messenger. From what I remember it automatically logs into your email account n’est pas? I seem to remember one of my mates signing up my hotmail account for a pic a day of old ladies getting it on (shiver). As far as I know its still getting delivered…
Yahoo delete your mail after a period as well, though I’ve no idea how long it is..
Where’s Robert Scoble when you need him?
Mark and Valehru, thanks for commenting - I’m on a Mac though so no Outlook Express - MSN Messenger - hmm, that would have been a possibility alright but at this point I am mot going back!
Fishy, I left him a comment on his site!
Hmmm…it’s always been like this because it’s a crap service. Wouldn’t be bothered with all the fuss though.
I forwarded this to the Hotmail team and will see what we can do. Sorry about that.
Piaras - I had a lot of old mails in that account - I have had the account for years, hence my anger.
Robert - thanks!
Thomas, unfortunately there’s nothing we can do to get it back. It was a business rule set years ago. They are changing the business rule in Windows Live to 120 days, though. Sorry, I agree this totally sucks.
tom, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last. frankly, there is no excuse for leaving valauable information on msn, gmail and the likes without having the most important stuff backed up, so stop flaming and blame yourself.
as mentioned above, use your msn account with messenger to avoid this in the future or even better, slam the door on microsoft.
personally i’m using miranda im (light-weight, open source, covers the most popular platforms incl. skype now, portable, smart, a bitch to configure, i love it
Goddamn fracking MS!
Robert - what you really mean here is there is nothing we will do - I’m pretty sure hotmail has backups in place but they are not about to expend the necessary energy to re-instate my account from backups.
Mattie - this was an old account with nothing recent of any value in it. You are right, of course, it was my fault - as I said in the post:
All my emails these days comes into my own domains.
now thats quite some heavy stuff here, tom
ponder this for a moment: MICROSOFT still has YOUR data, you just forfeit all rights, just because it’s ‘a business rule set years ago’
If I may play devils advocate for a moment… Hotmail is free, and as with all free products you know there is some catch, we all thought it was just cr@p storage space well now we know its also a cr@p login policy, to coin a phrase it has a a “trigger happy dead mans handle”
No problem.
Ambrand, Gmail is also free and they don’t have the same crappy policies - the free part is irrelevant to this.
Yes, because gmail was developed after hotmail, it had to outperform its competitors well known weakness’ in order to gain market share. However, doubtless it to has some problems. Again, if its free there is a catch.
Emailed you with a thought on this.
@mattie, thanks - you are correct, it does bear further thinking. I’ll let you know what, if anything, transpires.
@Ambrand, the ‘weakness’ in Gmail is that you are displayed ads in the web interface. This means they use content scanning algorithms to read your email. Of course, because of this ‘weakness’ it is in Google’s interest to ensure that they never lose any of your emails.
You can always get around the ad display in Gmail by accessing Gmail via POP - then you never see the ads.
@Simon - got the email, thanks.
If I may play devils advocate for a moment… Hotmail is free, and as with all free products you know there is some catch, we all thought it was just cr@p storage space well now we know its also a cr@p login policy, to coin a phrase it has a a “trigger happy dead mans handle�
I signed up to HoTMaiL long before Microsoft bought it. As I recall, this was a decision of MS’s, not the original owners. Tom is right - it is very unlikely that they no longer possess the actual emails, and the ‘business rule’ is just a marketing gimmick to differentiate from Hotmail Plus.
Have to agree with you, re: other free services not having this ridiculous rule. Yahoo has never had such a such, neither did the much lamented mailandnews.com, or to the best of my knowledge ANY of the former or currenly popular free online mail services. Additionally the attachment limit and default mailbox size which still (as you discovered) apply to new hotmail accounts, make the service a public joke.
Really enjoyed your interview at the blog awards podcasting session, could you remind me..what was the name of the OPML guy you were interviewing?
Hey Gareth,
thanks for the kind words. James Corbett is the guy you are looking for.
Tom-
First of all, Sorry this happened to you. The only thing I can really do is:
1) Appologize
2) Tell you that we are working very hard on changing the current policy
We do not actually back up our site. That would be impossible. GMail also does not back up their site. They have redundancy on the network for failures to hardware.
When an account is deleted, it takes a few days for the data to make it’s way out of the system. In your case (I don’t know how long it was deleted) the chances of recovery are unlikley.
Having said all this, I can understand if none of what I am saying matters. All I can do is appologize for what happened, and for the rather restrictive and poor expiration policy and let you know that I don’t consider the current situation acceptable (see #2 above).
Given the size and scope of the service, decisions like this take a while to work through.
Thanks,
Omar Shahine
Windows Live Mail
MSN SUCKS … :S
Why use hotmail ? its so stupid and shi*tty,
Just use Gmail, its the best ^_^
Yh my friends just had the same problem, so when researched came across this blog is a bit harsh he had 700 emails, Hotmail used to allow the pop for free accounts but no longer run this and havnt done for nearly 2 years now, do you know how i can get hold of a gmail account?
regards
EB, sure - send me your email address and I can send you an invite to Gmail - me email address is tom@tomrafteryit.net
Hello:
I have used hotmail for the last 3 years. Because my account was old, I could access it through Outlook Express, which I used diligently for quite a long time.
I purchased a mac about 1.5 months ago and the first thing I did was install Entourage so that I had outlook functionality through the mac.
Yesterday, my email was all deleted at hotmail. Why??? I do log into Hotmail from about once every 2 weeks, and I also use Outlook from time to time now, but there has not been any period of inactivity at all.
My problem/question is this:
I have about 99% of my email on my winxp laptop, is there any way that I can transfer it back into hotmail?
To Omar Shahine, excuse my language, but WTF? I use Hotmail through a secondary program, EVERY day!!! I have sent 2 emails to Hotmail about this problem, but nothing so far, but seriously, no notification, just plain, deletion…seems a little unreasonable.
Seriously, if anybody can help, it wuld be great.
I log in at my old Hotmail account every 15 days or so.
You can imagine my surprise when I opened it the other day and found EVERYTHING DELETED, even though I had definitely logged in at my account less than a month ago.
I am sure about the dates, because I visited my Hotmail account to get birthdays which I needed to add to my Google Calendar. And Google Calendar clearly shows the date I did this.
Now Hotmail has increased my storage quota to 25 MB, I guess hoping that what they have done to me will be forgiven and forgotten.
MSN, you really SUCK!
not only these, but when you login to hotmail now - you have to use the full userid @domain.tld
which sucks (they should gather this from the header (e.g. hotmail vs msn, etc.)
secondly, i want to see my inbox upon login not the stupid screen they show
third - it’s pretty slow compared to yahoo and gmail.
i remember when hotmail was good (pre microsoft), but MS has ruined it. why?
oh well - thank google for gmail!!
Can only agree completely with the above. I have a hotmail which I’ve used for 2-3 years for eBay communications and as such had a large bunch of receipts etc on that hotmail. However, I don’t buy something on eBay every month, so when I tried to log in this morning after enquiring for an item, I found all my data gone. That’s around 50 receipts gone in the wind, just because I didn’t log in for 30 days :O. All my warranties gone, f*ck!
I’ve never given this a second thought, but it really goes to show you unfortunately can’t trust Microsoft with your data, they are way too careless
Of course, I should have backed up the data but I actually thought my Hotmail was one of the safest places to store the data. Oh well, think again.
Im changing to Gmail that’s for sure
Hi,
Am trying to backup my messages in hotmail. I have
Oh man oh man, got the same complaint here. Years of old emails, vanished. To the argument that “it’s a free service, you play by their rules,” can the counterargument be made that, since we’re subjected to ads every time we log in, from which Microsoft draws revenue, it’s not like we’re total freeloaders?
For me, this loss is rather emotional - I knew this account was inferior to my shiny new Gmail model, but I kept the old warhorse around (though I didn’t visit as often as I should have, obviously) cause it’d been with me through countless moves, breakups, new jobs, etc. That stuff is comfortable old baggage you carry around for years without properly unpacking.
To the suggestion that I should have copy pasted this stuff into a Word document or something, I mean, come on. If I was that on top of my shit, I would have long ago forwarded sacred emails from my Hotmail account to something newer and sexier, and pulled the plug on the old thing altogether. It’s foolish to rely on a web-based email service as storage, but tons of us do it, and rather than punish our idiosyncrasies, Hotmail should have indulged. Gmail beat them to the punch. Gmail is everybody’s kindly, permissive, net-based grandma.
Since I’ve got nothing of value left in my newly cleaned-out Hotmail account, and I don’t feel like watching more junk mail pile up like so much moss on a stone, I’ll just let it die again, send a cautionary email about this saga to 100 of my closest friends, and never look back. I guess?
go to google and write
1- YOU SUCK
2- Press “im going to be lucky”
3- Check out that easter.
:=)
Note that MSN Messenger might consider you ‘logged in’, but Windows Messenger definitely does NOT…I logged in with that Windows Messenger account every day, and it recently just had the 30 day purge. I had years of emails on that as well.
I empathize!
I don’t know who any of you are, but I just typed in: My whole hotmail inbox just got deleted- and you came up. I had years of letters in that file, including pretty much the entire correspondence from my first relationship. so, thank for providing such a shit service Microsoft. Thanks, also for making it really clear that you were about to delete me. Also, thanks for having the nerve to ask me what junk I want when I try to find my old emails.
I feel terribly stupid. I would rather have the robots at google read my crappy love letters; at least they let me keep them for a while.
this blog seems to have the right idea though.
This just happened to me. 8 years of email, gone. Emails to my crush from a really happy time in my life. Gone. Fuck you, Hotmail. I’m more pissed than I ever thought I could be.
I am sure Microsoft is doing their best to offer good software. Too bad coders do not think of overall structure before they embed their code into something that is already working.
Why is it now that I enter Live Mail it will not allow me to click the back button to go back to where I was at? One claick back means that I have to re-enter my login and password. Another point here. Hotmail used to add the @hotmail.com when entering the system. It does not do that anymore.
I too lost two accounts full of email stuff that I had diligently tried to save for over four years. I was stuck in hospital - did not get the chance to get into my emails with the 30 day window. Now the pictures and stuff that I wanted to have avaialble when I went on holiday are no longer there. So I can understand that this 30 day rules needs to change to something more realistic.
I signed on last night to find 8 years of e-mail messages deleted from my ancient Hotmail account. I am still in an utter state of shock and customer support has informed me that they will not restore any of them. It’s not as if I had actually been using that account frequently in recent years, but I did have years of my life documented there - all gone. There are many reasons someone may not be able to sign on in a 30 day span. I will ONLY be using Google’s Gmail now. I hate you Microsoft.
I’ve had my Hotmail account for about 10 years now. TEN YEARS.
Memories of some of the best times of my life. Messages from friends I’ve lost all other contact with. Back when there was only a 2 MB limit, this was the stuff I chose to save.
Ten years, gone like that.
Fuck you, Hotmail.
heh i give up caring bout emails and past, wuds it for? leave it has a memory oce its gone probly loose a shit load of bad mempries to. specially if u was raped online cause u fell asleep at he keyboard lol. (as u can see emails and messaging have detoriated me brain) microsoft is to blame anyway lol.
Just logged in to find all of my emails gone. As most people, I didn’t use it because of how horrible it was but logged in every once in a while since it served as an archive of my emails over the past 5-6 years. I also signed up for Paypal with it and wanted to keep my contact email the same.
Atleast now I have the incentive to break all ties with it.
I can’t even believe it has been 30 days since I last logged into hotmail. It hasn’t been 30 days since I logged into messenger. My last 5 years of messages are gone. Sure it’s nothing I can’t live without but some good things, addresses, and I still legitimately used it on at least a monthly basis.
Hi. same things just happened to me. really ticked off. usualy i wont always go on the computer after ive just come in from work. and when i do try, sometimes msn just plays up big style and doesnt even let me sign in to my hotmail account! dont know if its just me or what!
i can see why hotmail is crap! 30 day limit! why the F@/K do they limit you to that when like you say other providers like yahoo and that give you atleast a couple of months! MSN has really gone OTT this time!
Yeah! Hotmail is really suck. If the people were to use Google Talk or Yahoo! Messenger more than they do with the sucking MSN Messenger, I’ll never use this stupid service anymore.
Yes just ahppened to me, unreal. fuck microsoft, I will never buy any of there shit products again. God I hoping fucking google comes out with a OP, I would gladdly pay $300 for it over microsoft shit.
It happened to me too! All my emails since 2003 have been deleted. It’s insane! But what can I do? Can I get them back!?
Hm, something really weird happened to me. I’ve been using my MSN account for 5-6 yrs now, and I’ve recently discovered that the oldest email I have is from 2004 (although I should have many before that time). I have never neglected to not sign in for 30 days (even though msn is not my primary email provider), so I do not know why my email from years back is not there. My sister also only has email from the past two years even though she’s been using her account for 4 yrs. OUTRAGE!!! I’m trying to contact customer care, see what they have to say…
I think you don’t even need to forget logging on for 30 days to get your emails deleted with Hotmail. I check my emails maybe 10 times a day. And every couple of days I loggon via MSN messenger too. Yesterday morning I could not log on because it said my password was wrong. I know it is not a hacker thing because it happened in the past as well because I was continuously logging on from different machines and there were web certificate issues (all bullshit) etc. Anyway I recovered my password using the secret question and logged on to the account. And then the big shock. All my emails were deleted even from the trash can folder. I have no idea what kind of stupid policy or bug could cause something like that. It is always the same Microsoft thinking it is smarter than the people using its products and continuously doing things behind closed doors. What can I say?
Are you guys saying there is no way to resurrect those emails back? And it is perfectly legal for MSN to purge emails with 30 days inactivity? I feel terrible of losing my 8 yrs emai history for this stupid policy, and I feel like I want sue them…
I too use hotmail. I’m here surfing around looking for a way to remove OLD hotmail accounts from my windows messenger service. I can’t figure that one out. Anyway… I like hotmail for one main reason. I can go almost any where and get my mail from any computer around. I also have LOST much from hotmail due to not signing in at least once a month. Many people use hotmail and yahoo for gaming sites. They need to sign in with a valid email addy. Certain other sites are free for a 24 hour period. People create 24 hr email addresses and change them everyday. Some have several per day. I am sure the MASSIVE build up of short term emails must be draining. So as far as a bussiness goes. It would be better bussiness sense to delete the weight. Plus microsoft wants people to PAY for the service of course. So for those that find it difficult to log in within a 30 day period. They may pay for an account. It may not be easy on the consumer. But again, this is all bussiness.
Jim, that might be a valid argument if Yahoo! and Google didn’t have competitive products which don’t have any such ridiculous restrictions and don’t try to get people to upgrade to paid accounts.
Ok…here is another thing that may help those that find it hard to log in once a month. I have several hotmail accounts. Due to a Work email, a private email, friends and family email etc. I put each of these emails on messenger service. When I log into one of them. I am notified of mail. Seems easier to me this way. I check mail more often and don’t get mail deletes.
Jim, one of the big problems with Hotmail is that it doesn’t allow you to collect your email via POP - you have to log in through the web interface.
Both Yahoo! and Google allow POP access to their respective email offerings so you can access your email from your normal email client application (Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird, etc.). This acts as a login to your account so you get to access al your email through one application and, because it counts as a login, your mail is not deleted.
Microsoft, at 30 days, have the shortest time after which your email is deleted and make it the most difficult for you to actually login to prevent your email being deleted.
This just happened to me and it sucks big time.
I have had an account for over ten years. In that time, I have never failed to log in outside of this time limit. I guess I see myself as a valuable customer, especially since I believe I gave hotmail some very valuable technical ideas regarding spam filtering, which were ripped off, which when implemented some six months later were announced as revolutionary at the time by M$’s marketeers, but I obviously made the mistake of giving them to MS for free, to which I had to push even for a “thank you for your suggestion, it will be considered”. I wasn’t expecting payment, but a subscription to one of the new (LIVE) pay accounts would have been nice.
I am so thankful I moved my day to day mail to yahoo and gmail around that time, so not only now do I receive the pop3 access, but much less spam (due to better implementation of my idea), better interfaces, and most importantly less of a time limit.
With hindsight I could have made a bit of cash as a privateer on this venture, but was silly enough to believe it would benefit the greater good. Even so, Microsoft even screwed up the implementation of this! Hence my account lay stagnant, collecting emails off long lost friends who still had that address, and an archive of important emails that I had been unable to get onto another media because of my prior reluctance to pay for pop3 in a substandard mail service. Little did I believe the day would come when MS would say I hadn’t logged in for 30days.
However, this came today. Due to a holiday and recent firewall issues I cannot be 100% that I logged in to my account within the last 30days, but I am fairly confident I did so. So I come to my mail account today and all is gone.
So, thanks for fack all Microsoft, not only did I have no way of archiving old email out to file prior to this issue (via free pop3) so my mail was protected, but I now recognise even more the shocking
b) you not consider
And sorry Omar Shahine, whilst I’m grateful that you recognise the issue, the turnaround time on such enhancements is abysmal, and shows the respect that microsoft have for the guys that built your company by recommending and developing your products.
Suffice to say, if Microsoft turned around and offered “Sorry your account has been deleted due to lack of access, but you can get back all your mails if you upgrade to Live now, else say goodbye forever” I, and many others would have cringed but gone for it. Unfortunately hotmail must be the place where microsoft inspiration dies. RIP.
Sorry, meant innovation, but care would do as well!
The same has recently happened to me! And for no reason at all as I check my emails daily. I have had my account for the last 8 years and my inbox was 75% full with hundreds of emails….mostly just sentimental stuff!
I opened my email account 2 days ago to find only 28 messages in my inbox spanning over the last year (I know there were definately hundreds of emails from the last year but for some reason there were just 28 random emails left!). Strangely enough any emails I had arranged into folders are still there….so that was a bonus of sorts.
I wrote to hotmail to find out about what had happened and to see if I could get my emails back. ‘Glenn’ wrote back and told me he noticed from my information that I used Outlook Express to check my hotmail account at one time and that hotmail cannot get these emails back when they are downloaded through Outlook Express. I did use outlook in around 2001 but from reading this website that service is only available to paying customers now….which I’m not! And I know fine well I’ve not used Outlook since about 2001 anyway…..AND have had two new computers since then so thats definately not the problem!
Glenn then nicely told me that he would try to recover my emails but if he did not manage this within the next 72 hours then they would be permanently lost. I replied to this email twice and as of yet I’ve not received another reply.
To add insult to injury Glenn then added at the end of the email “You are a valuable customer to MSN and we are glad to give you consistent and effective service.”…who said they give me a consistent and effective service! Consistently they appear to be deleting people’s emails and are effective at doing it!
Finally, someplace to unleash fury at the Live Mail access problems for hotmail. I am certain it is a deliberate attempt to extort a paid account.
A paid account? Why would I want that? I have a Gmail account, a Yahoo! account and unlimited accounts on several domains I own.
I have no interest whatsoever in having a paid account.
Although I don’t believe in the extortion theory: Some people may not want to lose their hotmail address. So they’d rather pay.
soooo shitty,
i have a wedding photography job tomorrow morning. all the details of it are on email that i realise now have been deleted. the exact schedule is on email….i mean my god what am i going to say to these people. i feel like a dick head…for not realising what happens after 30 days so i could be sure to back everything up properly. i understand that it gets done now and its not really an issue if we new about it. i dont think its told to us newbies very clearly at the begining.
this sux
I just had mine deleted a few days ago. And the worst of it is, I don’t want to switch to the cubersome Live version which may in the future have the business-rule changed.
And the old-hotmail doesn’t cut it because they can’t seem to have any consistency whatsoever. Sometimes when I click ‘back’ I go to the screen i was at before (i.e. reading a message). Othertimes I’m thrown to my Inbox. User experience should be consistent. A button click should always do the same thing, not some random choice!
And gmail is just not good enough for me. I can’t switch out of that stupid annoying ‘conversations’ view. *rolls eyes* I have a few threads in my gmail inbox where I have more than 30 emails in one thread. WTF? How’s that convenient for me? It should be an option, not the only choice to have ‘conversations’.
And yahoo…well, I’m not used to trusting Yahoo with my email + omg so many ads.
Hi I just found out that all my hotmail and email contacts were deleted also!!! I am really ticked about this!!!! Why don’t they warn you about this or send you a heads up (that would be nice) instead of just deleting all your info!!! I’m not sure what to do about this and want to get my info back…asap Help! Anyone with info please send it to me
Thanx
I am new to hotmail, and really only signed up for MSN. However, just a word of warning, yahoo did the same thing to me. I hadn’t logged in to my yahoo account for a couple of months due to a move and new job etc. Everything was deleted. I feel quite bereft. Gmail is definitely the way to go. ANyone know if there’s a way of saving messages in hotmail so they don’t get deleted after 30 days. Now I just forward them to my Gmail account, but that’s a bit tedious
Cheers and sympathy to all
Andie
Fucking MSN and Microsoft…..I was waiting for a really important file from a partner from abroad, a mp3 file, that got deleted after almost 30 minutes of molasses like transfer.
Who the fuck they think they are? I paid for the piece of shit they want to “protect” namely XP. How dare they delete the files just because they think they might be may be harmful?
my problem is that i did not use the mail account for more than 30 days once so my all old messages are deleted.. pls get those back for me as they were really imporatant for me. kunal maniar
my email id is kunal_m007@hotmail.com
thank you
Same here. 12 years of emails. More or less stopped using it unless for transactions and account setups 4 years ago. So I have highschool emails, fan replies, just a lot of memories gone. My reply from them, the files get deleted, then purged from the server where even there technical department can’t retrieve them. So that response prompted “DELETE HOTMAIL ACCOUNT”. No more hotmail. I believe there should be some sort of policy for long time users especially as I have used hotmail longer than more dot coms. Oh well Cie la vie! ASSHOLES!!!!
I got a message that I can not send more mails today since I have exceed my daily quota???!!! about 10 mails. did not know about this and has not happend before and I use hotmail everyday. /lotta
MSN: THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE CORPORATE POLICY
I’ve just returned from 2 month vacation and was horrified to check my MSN to find all of my prior emails and contacts were deleted?!
Given trivial memory costs for email storage today and the new competitive landscape with innovative firms as Google, it is disconcerting to understand how a company like MSN who was a pioneer in email is now behaving in such a manner and shutting out future Microsoft clients of its products who are obviously mad as hell. I assure you if you do not resolve this issue, I will not buy a single Microsoft product again.
It is my hope that MSN will do the right thing as a corporate citizen and review its policy to benchmark against the best practices of industry and its competitors.
Here’s hoping for the best but planning for the worse.
A grieving MSN client
Better back up all of your webmail into an Outlook Express or similar program on your computer (using POP).
Gmail has a problem of its own too. Here is a thread I’ve found: “Gmail Disaster: Reports Of Mass Email Deletions” at
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email-deletions/
So actually about 60 Gmail users have lost all their emails.
It’s hard to trust any web-based mailbox in a long term! Can you be sure that in 10 years, on a perfect day, all of your Gmail’s mailbox won’t be gone like what happens with your Hotmail’s mailbox today?
So please do backup folks! And good luck!
Its “FREE” and don’t expect much from it, there are millions of users and if they don’t clear it soon they will run out of disk space. If you don’t like it just get a paid POP account. Its not easy to handle millions of accounts especially when they are giving it to you FREE OF CHARGE!!!
Quote:
“I’ve just returned from 2 month vacation and was horrified to check my MSN to find all of my prior emails and contacts were deleted?!”
There are lots of internet cafe around the world no matter where u go even the hotels. You have a choice to log in for a few mins once a mth, its not hard for you to do so and i do believe they have an agreement signed when you sign up for the e-mail account, read the agreement and if you don’t like it just don’t sign for it ;p
I am so upset. I just found all my e-mails dating back to 1998 have been deleted!
Is there anything that can be done? I’m very sad.
Well, guess how I arrived at this page…
This is yet another proof of how much M$ values your using their services. Too bad we never learn. F… you, Bill.
- Beta User - Free my a**!!! The money these people make through advertising and wotever else is astonishing!! it’s free for a reason, to get us interested. Why do u think everyone in the whole world knows about hotmail? its a joke that a company that big and with so much backing can just tell you to bugger off bcoz u aint used the accountfor a few weeks. money grabbing f***ers!!! they don’t give a rats a** bout us. Emails since 1998, i move house, internet is f***ed for a while, cum bck andeverything is gone. piss takers!!!
i still got my contacts but fat lot a good that does i only got 4 and they were from ebay waaaaaayyyyy back when i got some ultima stuff i use my emaill all the time it show i pay bills and stuff i got no message nothing i log in today to check my tv bill and bang wth is this live crap never seen it before well all my crap is gone so ill never see it again no point in going back i dont take it in the tail pipe on purpose if i dont have to least bill gates coulda bought me dinner first he is a billionaire after all
I am a customer of the service since its original owners way back when. Gotta be close to 10 years. And like many people I had alot of memories, addresses and other information there. I logged on pretty regularly, every few weeks on hotmail and certainly within the last 2 weeks on MS Messenger.
And I log on today to find it all destoyed.
It is just shocking that a company, especially one as profitable as microsoft, would screw over so many customers like that.
I appreciate the whole ‘Dont trust a website with your critical data’. Yeah ok, but just because we put something in an attic instead of a safety deposit box doesnt mean we ascribe 0 value to it.
And I completely dont buy the ‘they have too many accounts and need to delete the 1 day wonders’. First of all, thats covered in their ’sign in within 10 days’ policy. And second, how about a break for people who have had their account for years? Is that such a innovative concept? 1 month of not logging in for each year you have been a customer?
Seems like many industries treat first time customers, and 10 year customers differently, but heck what do I know.
As for the ‘You should have read the TOS!’ thing. Um, that policy wasnt in place with the original hotmail company, when I signed up for the service. While Im sure I have blindly agreed to whatever dozens of TOS they have put in front of me since then, you have to be kidding if you think Im going to scour your 20 page TOS everyime I use my email.
I would just prefer to not deal with a company which has such shocking disregard for its customer base.
Oh and for the record, its now been over 14 months since Omar Shahine came here and claimed that they were working to change this. 14 months?!?
While I have no idea, I suspect it didnt take them 14 months to implement this account destroying policy.
30 days? Get serious.
No, the information wasn’t critical but it was still important.
Can’t you figure out the cost of lost trust can’t be made up for in computer memory savings?
Shame on you Microsoft.
Wow, Omar! I guess I didn’t appreciate what you meant back in MARCH 2006 when you said,
I suppose given MS’s history of pushing back release dates, we should have known that “a while to work through” would mean “never.”
Years and years of my fiance’s e-mails are gone, because she happened to have a difficult, busy time at work. Adoption papers that she had hoped to share with her daughter… more, more, more. She’s devastated. (Yes, shame on her for trusting the Web to save these and other treasures. That is not a particularly helpful sentiment right now.)
I, fortunately, use Gmail for my real mail; my Hotmail account is only for junk mail & I’ll change that now. What else can I do? I guess I’ll get a PS3 instead of an XBox 360 (I have an XBox now), make sure that my next computer is a Mac, shun anything else that has the word Microsoft. What a shame.
Irony Department: Just read this Wired article today — http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/wired40_microsoft.html. So much for the fabulous new Microsoft.
Mike,
we did in fact change out expiration policies. If you are using Windows Live Hotmail the expiration is now 120 days (up from 30 days).
-Omar
i was wondering if u can track ip addresses because some kids i know hacked my account because they told me they were going to change my name on msn messanger. and i want to prove they did it but i dont know how to check where u last signed in at by useing the ip address. u can use thier email i know that. plz help me!!
Hi guys, guess how I got here…
I really don’t give a damn if they delete my mail or not,
I’d just like to have a simple notice before they do so.
WTF is the point in asking for a secondary e-mail address if
they don’t even use it to give a nice heads-up before flushing
years of memories down the toilet. I hope Microsoft goes down in flames some day.
2001 -2007 GONE
Everything has gone. I am sure I had logged on within 30 days. Why wasn’t I contacted via my secondary email which they requested.
I am totally devastated. I trusted microsoft. I am still in shock. No point in keeping hotmail now, they can go to hell.
Another things is………why leave all my contacts information??? If you can leave that why NOT leave my designated folders !!!!!!!!and all my cherished files !!!!!