How to get into my dinosaur Hotmail account

March 28, 2016 7:58 AM

I had hotmail (and only hotmail - no other accounts I would've been able to give hotmail for recovery purposes) when I was like 12 years old or something. I naturally moved on to Gmail when it came out. How on Earth can I get back into this account not knowing my password at all? Something super important I realized is most likely in that account. Thank you!
posted by jitterbug perfume to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

How long has it been since you used it? They deactivate unused accounts after a year or so, I believe. So if you haven't used it within a year, most likely it no longer exists.
posted by primethyme at 8:04 AM on March 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

There's an account recovery option on the outlook.com homepage (which is where MS moved Hotmail to) but yeah, if it's been >365 days with no access the account has probably been deleted.
posted by Wretch729 at 8:06 AM on March 28, 2016

I'm pretty sure I left my hotmail account for about a year or more and it still exists. (It is connected to my Skype, though, which I use pretty often.)
posted by LoonyLovegood at 8:18 AM on March 28, 2016

I accessed an old hotmail account recently and was able to log in, but there was nothing there - everything had been purged.

The super important thing has gone, I'm afraid.
posted by 7 Minutes of Madness at 8:22 AM on March 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's gone. Sorry :( They used to have a policy of deleting everything from an inactive account after some period of time much shorter than you're likely talking about. That policy may be over now that storage is cheaper, not sure, but if you've forgotten your password in the interim your old emails are almost certainly gone. As far as I've been able to tell, there's no way to get them back.

It stinks because they used to have such a low storage limit too so it was all that work to be constantly deleting all but the very most important of old emails to make sure you had enough room in your inbox. You ended up with this amazing curated collection of treasured correspondence and only the most important things survived. But forget that login requirement for a little while and *poof*.
posted by town of cats at 8:59 AM on March 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not sure how long ago you were 12; we will assume it was more than 3 years ago. For me, when Microsoft changed their direction and Hotmail became Outlook all "inactive" accounts were purged. I lost a lot of cool keepsake emails that day and affirmed how much I really disliked everything Microsoft.
posted by bkeene12 at 9:58 AM on March 28, 2016

While I don't think they expire accounts as aggressively these days, if the account was from before around 2013 or so, it almost certainly expired, and whatever email was in it would be long gone by now. If the super important thing isn't an email, but you just need to be able to access the account to receive email for it, you could try signing up for the email address again.
posted by Aleyn at 12:40 PM on March 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Well hell. Thanks guys. And - this is why I switched!
posted by jitterbug perfume at 4:24 PM on March 28, 2016