Hotmail Account Deactivation

[jonathan_phang]

Morning all,

just spoke top my dad whos been in malaysia for the last few months and he was trying to get me to comfirm his hotmail address to him (ie. co.uk or .com) so i logged in but it appeared to have been deactivated - this doesnt surprise me as he doesnt really check all the time.

What was odd was the fact that all his old emails (photos etc) had been deleted. Has anyone else experienced this? I can understand having to reactivate, but is there anyway of getting the old email back? I asked my dad, and he says that he definitely looked at the account in January at least, so would they get rid of peoples stuff so quick? its not even been 6 months!!

[streetster]

3 months isnt it? something short.... If you get a Premium account (and pay however-much-per-month) then youre account doesnt get de-activated with re-use...

tho to be honest, you shouldnt really use hotmail as a 'serious' e-mail account, just use it as a spam bucket

[jonathan_phang]

It makes sense for my old man to use a web account, as hes retired and often back and forth between here and abroad... And I dont fancy letting him know POP3 setting all the time!!! I always knew about the deactivation, but i didnt think that they cleaned out the account... oh well.

[jamin]

Hotmail T&C's state that you must log in at least every 30 days.To keep an account active. Although they don't delete the contents of the mailbox this quick normally.

I have an adress that I only use when gaming (which is quite sporadic) so when I log in after some time off I tend to get "we have reserved this email address for you!" And have to confirm my details all over again.

[bobbyzero]

Don't think Gmail has a requirement to log in regularly, plenty of people (including me) forward a gmail account to elsewhere and just use it for spam filtering. (Forwarding and POP3 are free on Gmail)

Just checked - not been into it since at least feb and it's still there, as expected.