I logged into my Windows Live email account yesterday only to find all my email deleted. Not even a single solitary spam message left. I should be livid. Should be tearing what little hair I have left out of my head.
Instead I am simply moderately furious!
Why? Well this is not the first time Microsoft decided to delete all the email from my (then Hotmail) account. So I learned after losing valuable email the first time, not to trust any important email to Microsoft.
What makes it more annoying is that if Microsoft allowed POP access to Live Mail accounts, the way Gmail does, you would be logged in every time you fire up your email client app and you would have a local backup of your mail. But Microsoft won’t do that. Why? Because that might be useful?
After the first time I lost all my email, I didn’t trust Live Mail with any important email so this time I didn’t lose anything valuable. I kept the account because a few old domains are pointed at the email address.
Now, however, I will simply not use Live Mail for anything. I will switch the domains to point at a reliable email service.
Microsoft have a huge image problem. They are perceived as deeply uncool. Vista hasn’t helped this at all. But Windows Live is the public face of Microsoft. When Windows Live does things like ensures people can’t download their email, and then deletes it without warning, it is no wonder that Microsoft is considered yesterday’s company.
That really is a gargantuan Epic Fail.
I’d redirect everything to Google Apps and get the hell out of that town pretty snappy… If Gmail starts mass-deleting email on sight then we all have far bigger problems.
Really Sad Situation!
I cannot think of anything if my mails were deleted. It looks like new email is formed with the old one. May be from yourname@hotmail.com to yourname@live.com.
Not trying to defend their actions, but if you use their desktop e-mail client - Windows Live Mail - then you can access your Hotmail mail from your desktop.
I do that myself for my domain’s e-mail which is hosted by them.
Just not sure whether I’m still supposed to manually log in at least once every 6 months…
I’ve been using Hotmail for ages now, simply because I’ve got an address I like (and gmail doesn’t have the same one available so I can’t simply switch across…)
Then again, it might be worth the hassle of emailing my contact list and changing all of my registration details, if only to have the peace of mind that all of my emails won’t get deleted!
I’ll be backing up my emilas now anyway…
Sorry to hear for your loss, Tom
You should have known better and use either Yahoo! or Gmail…
Hotmail had a policy that you had to login once every 30 days to keep the account active. If you failed to login the account was deemed inactive and all emails were deleted. After this, if you logged in within a certain time of which I’m unsure, possibly 6 months, you could reactivate the account but it would be empty. Is it possible that this policy is still in place and that you did not login within a 30 day timespan?
you have my sympathy. logged on today to two old hotmail accounts and everything has disappeared. i don’t understand it. i have used them infrequently for years and everything has been fine. now all gone. sad….
Such a pain. I’ve recently had the same experience with the Hotmail account I had for 9 years. All my old emails (with tonnes of sentimental value) are now gone forever. I got on to them about it and they emailed back explaining the following:
* After 60 days without signing in, all mails are deleted.
* You account stays active for 120 days.
* After 365 days your Windows Live ID will be deleted
I would be less upset if the entire account was deleted! It’s so infuriating to log in to your account and find it empty. It felt like a huge invasion of privacy, like somebody snuck into my account overnight and stole all of my emails. It creates a complete lack of trust…
Aua!
That´s a real bad thing, loosing all conversations, would be “nice” at my german emailprovider web.de, there are about 5.8 GB of mails and other things stored online (I´m in there since several years.)…
I feel with you!
Johannes
netjobbers.de
Disaster! Nothing worse than losing your mails, I lost over a gig of mails for 24hrs (Hardware failure) - what a nightmare…
Thats a tough thing. I managed to find a contact in Microsoft tech support that was able to help me out and recover my mail when ths happened to me. Did you try escalating to their online support team?
I found this page by googling to see whether the same thing has happened to others. I logged in to find that 8 years of e-mail are gone. I am at a loss, as there were a lot of old things that I would liked to have kept, for posterity mostly. Is there any way I can recover this?
You can use Thunderbird to access Hotmail/Windows live accounts - that’s what I’ve done and I have local copies of everything.
i feel your pain, this happened to me as well. i need to find an old email toshiba sent me to verify a purchase, i logged into my account only to find that everything had been wiped clean, drove me nuts!
J
I can honestly say that moving to Vista was one of the worst things that I ever did. Mainly because it is one of the worst products I’ve ever used. Sorry about your email troubles - I’m gmail all the way.
want to restore all contacts anm emails from live account
Dark side of FREE mail accounts…
hoster does not take any responcibility for your data.
Hi.
Are you sure WLM do this ? I use alot of POP3 software but prefer MS outlook.
By the way thanks for your friendfull share.
Omer KARADENIZ
MCITP
Blog: http://www.omerkaradeniz.com