About a year ago I lost all the mails I had saved in my Hotmail account, because according to the site I had not logged in during at least 90 days. At that time I was sure it was not true, because I had checked my mail right before my wedding (which was about a month ago at that time), but could not do anything about it. I then decided not to use Hotmail anymore, except for signing up to websites that I did not fully trust. I am glad I did so.
Today I logged into Hotmail again, and I get the message “congratulations, an account has been reserved for you”. Huh? I click on continue and read that I have not logged in for 30 days (not 90 days as before) so all my emails have been deleted – again. I understand that hotmail does not like clients that only occasionally use their services, but is 30 days not a bit short? I normally check my mails there once a week, but because of a busy schedule, october holidays and a business trip I postponed doing that to (apparently) just over 30 days. And as a result I not only loose my old mails again, but also don’t know what mails I received over the past 30 days.
Hotmail is plain arrogant as well. Other mail services that I use send at least a reminder to another email address if you did not log in for a certain period. Hotmail just deletes your messages without a warning. And not only that, they even congratulate you that an account has been reserved for you. Amazing that they can get away with this.
Independent of this Hotmail action, I had already decided not to rely too much on free email accounts anymore. I used to use my Gmail account a lot for business as well, but because the mailbox is only about 2.8 GB I constantly had to delete mail in order not to get ‘mailbox full’ messages. Furthermore, Gmail was sometimes unavailable in China, which is annoying. But I have now switched to my Spill Group address for most business mails, and only use Gmail for private mails. All my email is safely stored on our own servers, and it automatically synchronizes the mail on all my computers (and even on my phone!). I should have done this much earlier already, but never wanted to invest the few hours that it takes to set it all up.
I stopped using hotmail years ago already. Both yahoo and gmail are so much better than it in terms of UI, spam-screening, and size of mailbox. Hotmail for me is just a user name for MSN.
Hotmail is simply trash. Your problem with “only” 2.8 Gb mailbox in gmail can be skiped by using several gmail accounts. It is realatively simple then to bypass all your incoming mails to only one account, without deleting the original ones. So you can read all of them in one account and save them in several boxes.
Yahho is also a valid option for me. Hotmail passed away for me two years ago, after a similar experience.
@ Johnny: The problem is that it’s not possible to automatically forward old mail from one Gmail account to another. You need to do this manually (or maybe write a script for that, something I am not good at). For all new mail this works, but once your account is already 98% full this is not a feasible solution. I am now downloading my old Gmail to Outlook, so I have a backup there. Then I will delete lots of old mails in Gmail, and keep using the account for private mail. Hopefully one day they will offer unlimited storage!
Same thing just happened to me. I’ve had a hotmail account since before microsoft bought them out. This is so stupid. I had like 35MB of messages saved. So they are willing to lose a customer for life, in return for 35MB of hard disk space. Great business move Bill. And only 30 days? Geez. Get with it.
I had two email accounts since 1997, and both were deleted about a year and a half agoo after 30 days of inactivity. I lost lots of personal history when that happened and got no response to my emails to customer service. It was bad enough that at the time the space limit on my accounts was 2mb.
Hotmail has deleted all my email-some of it going back 10 years- it was only a couple of emails, why did they do it? CAN ANYBODY HELP ME?
The same happened to me, twice and I will never use hotmail again. The manager in hotmail who make this stupied decision is just son of a bitch!! And he/she will go to the hell later.FUCK!!
I know this is a old thread, but there are no rules at this lol.
They deleted my email yesterday. I had uploaded a few youtube videoes, that took some hours to make. I cant login to my youtube acc anymore.