8 ms·
The same happened to my old "...@hotmail.com" email, Microsoft deleted old childhood emails, still bitter about that. Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/o
by fhrow4484 6y ago
The same happened to my old "...@hotmail.com" email, Microsoft deleted old childhood emails, still bitter about that.
Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-orestoremail/all-emails-from-my-hotmail-account-is-purged-what/627fea66-56c5-43eb-9cab-332d31c100ee https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail... , the limit is 365 days of inactivity.
- vecinu 6y agoLikewise, so many amazing memories lost. I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online.
- Alex3917 6y ago> I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online. This is the video that comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4
- ghaff 6y agoTo give a little perspective, I basically don't have any pre-Yahoo/Google email history. So maybe going back 20 years or so and not much in the way of digital archives before about 10 years before that. Essentially nothing from BBS days, email on various proprietary systems, etc. Some shards here and there from the 1980s and a few things that were digitized prior. I'm not sure if it's good or bad (probably a bit of both) that much of my early time online is largely gone--and I didn't have a significant time "online" before I was about 20 or so.
- kelnos 6y agoI have email from when I got my college email address in the late 90s, but I still can't find email from earlier, when I had a couple different addresses that I'd gotten from my local dial-up ISP. I was always -- even then, when hard drive space was expensive -- pretty good about keeping old data as I moved from machine to machine, so it really bums me out that I can't find that old stuff.
- bigiain 6y agoI have a collection of Eudora backups still kicking around (an old Mac OS9 and earlier vintage mail client). I don't have a _good_ way to read them any more (but at least I can grep them when I want to hunt an old email down... I've done that maybe twice in the last decade...)
- ghaff 6y agoFor the 2000s, I do have an Outlook .pst somewhere I could probably find for work email. But I've probably pretty much exported any docs I care about from that era and likely wouldn't go to the trouble of digging anything else out.
- e_y_ 6y agoI think I dumped a backup of my Juno emails (90s offline dial-up email for kids with parents too cheap to shell out for internet) but it's probably on some obsolete media like a Zip drive somewhere. Probably for the best.
- Aeolun 6y agoYeah, at the time I archived a bunch of MSN messenger chats, and looking back at those now is fantastic. Unfortunately it’s the only thing I have left. There must be a DVD somewhere with my my documents folder from 2004, but it’s lost to time.
- xtracto 6y agoA short time ago I finally found my Geocities webpage (from 1999) in the archive just by chance [It is in Spanish]: https://web.archive.org/web/20010718195237/http://www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/backstage/4681/frame1.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010718195237/http://www.geocit... It was a blast from the past for me, amazing times for the internet.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoI lost my free Hotmail account of almost a decade when the limit was 30 days.
- PlugTunin 6y agoYeah, that 30-day window was ridiculous. I lost my hotmail in 2006 after exclusively using gmail for 6 weeks. I'd like to know the origins of the policy. Who decided that if someone goes a few weeks without checking their email that they're either dead or no longer interested in using the internet?
- est31 6y agoIt was a different MS back then, cloud services were still new, and companies were still figuring it out. Maybe the reasoning was to keep people afraid from using hotmail alternatives in fear of losing their accounts.
- eli 6y agoOr less charitably, they were trying to sell the premium accounts where that doesn’t happen.
- Cactus2018 6y agoFound this source from Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ouster/ https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoWhen Outlook.com was first made available as a mail domain back in 2012, I immediately went and registered a few accounts, figuring that it would become a high-profile service pretty quickly. One of them I have almost never used, and in its eight-year lifespan it's received...(checks)...7 emails. All of which were from Microsoft. That account is still up, though, and I don't believe I've checked it from the website itself in years, although it is one of the accounts I've linked to my Outlook app. So the mere act of polling an account for email might be enough to be considered "active". I haven't checked what would happen if I did the same polling but only used Thunderbird instead.
- koolba 6y agoIf IMAP only usage was considered inactive I’d have lost my gmail and hotmail accounts over a decade ago. Startup idea: SaaS that you register you email addresses and periodically does an IMAP request to keep them active. Premium tier would provide actual archiving of your emails.
- spicybright 6y agoYuk. What use is a SaaS for archiving when it's just going to "sun set" in 6 months after the owners sell it to Google?
- bigiain 6y agoIf it wasn't for the "this service would need access to my email account creds and therefore to all my mail" showstopper... A distributed service where a group of people all have their own service to "ping" their personal "important accounts", and which accept federation with friends or other users of the service, so if your server/vps/serverless/whatever platform instance goes down your pings still happen from your connected servers. Elevator pitch: "Like IPFS, but for cron jobs calling curl."
- sys_64738 6y agoM$ used to delete HoTMaiL emails after 2w inactivity in the early 2000s. Back when the limit was 20MB.
- throwaway123x2 6y agoHeh I remember when they changed the 6MB limit to 2MB
- Cactus2018 6y agoThe name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL").
- dudus 6y agoThat has to be why they call it office 365.
- cameronh90 6y agoWell it's certainly not the uptime!
- pcdoodle 6y agohaha.... :'(
- Aeolun 6y agoI guess there is some measure of uptime every day?
- tehjoker 6y agoDo they have to change the branding on leap years?
- ge96 6y agoI guess my deceased dad's email was deleted(hotmail). I found an old email address of his and was trying to get into it just to reconnect since he died when I was a child. I get shouldn't see other people's stuff but still... would have been interesting as it was in the early 2000's that he was around. Would have liked to see how his mind operated. Afterall he was a successful person (eg. operating a 60ft yacht for several years) and he also referred to the handover of Hong Kong to China 1997 in recent context. I unfortunately did not inherit/learn that business savviness aspect. Seeing his emails would have been like time travel. I had that Black Mirror thought to strip personality from data.
- cm2187 6y agoMy reaction in a similar situation was to rather preserve his privacy. I don't know that mailboxes should be made available to relatives after one dies.
- ge96 6y agoYeah and it could go both ways. You can try to get something out of it or also what if you're tied to their problems(eg. debt) that would suck. But yeah TL;DR I don't really remember my own father so would be nice to see more of what his life was like.
- Aeolun 6y agoPersonally I think it would be fun if my son was interested in what’s in my emails after I’m dead. On the other hand, it’s all horribly mundane, so you’d quickly get bored.
- WalterBright 6y agoMy parents obsessively kept every family letter, the good, the bad, the sad, even the embarrassing. It's kind of a treasure trove for me. I get to see their take on events I remember. The letters go back well over a century.
- scrollaway 6y ago
- mypalmike 6y agoSame - many years of emails just gone. That experience is what made me start archiving all my email locally (simply Thunderbird with IMAP + routine Time Machine backups).
- Angostura 6y agoIt's why I use POP wherever possible.
- whymauri 6y agoIn a weird way, it's kinda comforting that other people have felt this. I spent ten (!) years trying to recover my childhood e-mail address which got hacked when I was a kid (password was 1123456789, lol). It was only this year that I _finally_ got to a human support agent who could verify my ID and told me that the account was completely wiped. It was a bittersweet moment, for sure.
- blackrock 6y agoHmm.. that sounds like my password. I should go change it.
- WalterBright 6y ago> I should go change it. Too late! (Seriously, folks, change your password first, then post!)
- tpoacher 6y ago"Amazing! I've got the same on my luggage!"
- pishpash 6y agoWhat a weird era when we record everything but also let it all get deleted/not be looked at. Maybe curation-on-creation was the right model after all.
- px43 6y agoAlso a massive security hole. I needed to do a password reset on my old ebay account, but the hotmail account it was attached to was deleted, so I just created a new hotmail account with the same name, and reset my password. I've done this maybe three or four time, because I haven't used hotmail since high school, so they keep deleting it. A lot of people also have password resets on gmail linked to their old hotmail accounts, so you can just re-create their old hotmail to hijack their current gmail.
- spicybright 6y agoOmg, yikes. Email is the universal "password reset" mechanism for the whole web too. Re-using emails sounds like a bad plan just from the start, surprised services allow that.
- bigiain 6y agoTo be fair, email account providers - and particularly free ones like hotmail/yahoo/gmail - never agreed to be your partner providing banking/military grade security to the rest of your online accounts. Same as how your telco never agreed to have SMS be a secure protocol for 2FA or password resets.[1] Far from being surprised free email services "allow reusing emails", I'm way more surprised that orgs like banks and PayPal and crypto exchanges allow using email or sms as "secure reset or 2FA" protocols. 1: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for-bank-transactions-322194 http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for-...
- will_pseudonym 6y agoI've gotten bitten by Google locking me out of an account because I hadn't logged into it in a long time, and the device that I used to log into it was stolen long ago. Even though I have full access to the recovery email address on that account, because it's an unknown device, Google blocks me from accessing it. In a similar way but a different mechanism, I also had the same thing happen with some accounts which I had opened up using my mobile phone number. I have struggled with mental illness throughout my life, and one of the things that can happen through crises in particular that can have vicious consequences is having no ability to regulate your behavior, in particular your finances, so you easily and quickly wrack up debt, cash out retirement accounts and blow through all that money, and being unable to pay your phone bill (or any other bill) leads you to losing that phone number, and any account which you access through that number. The systems that we use as a society to authenticate identity for access to digital services and systems, is incredibly punishing to people who struggle with mental health issues. It's a bit of an own goal, since some of the potential solutions to it are potentially technical in nature rather than requiring legislative or societal action. That said, the difficulties presented by the digital world to people who struggle with mental illness pale in comparison to those they face in the physical world, and how ineffective the society, governments, and medicine are at helping those people, sometimes hurting them in that process through lack of training, ability, and the flaws in the design of the overall systems.
- Nas808 6y agoI still have an old @msn.com email address, I remember at the time you could choose from @hotmail.com, @msn.com or @passport.com. Haven't used it for email for at least a decade, but I do use it for OneDrive so my account stays "active".
- spicybright 6y agoHa, passport.com. Thx for the memories.
- cryptoz 6y agoI lost my personal domain from this. I didn't log in to my hotmail email for 30 days (2006) and they closed my account. Then they let someone else register my email, which they used to steal my domain. No recourse. Haven't used MS services since then if I can avoid it.
- xtracto 6y agoHa! I came here to say the same. THE reason I have never used my hotmail for something serious is that they deleted a lot of my childhood memories in that deletion... I opened my Hotmail account around 1998, and they just deleted all of my memories.
- Cactus2018 6y agoThey deleted everything after a long backpacking trip. I'm still bitter. Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ouster/ https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...
- davejardim 6y agoafter 30 days!
- Triv888 6y agoWhen Yahoo bought rocmketmail the same happened to me but I think it was 6 months
- csomar 6y agoThat's funny because I moved from Hotmail to Gmail because they did exactly that to my account. Luckily, I know better now and pay $$ for my own mail box and storage.
- pishpash 6y agoNever trust cloud providers for archival data I think is the lesson. Keep your own storage for that.
- ValentineC 6y agoSame with Fastmail, which used to have free accounts, but (permanently) deactivated them after 120 days of inactivity: https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service-levels/ https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service... I just found that I can re-register my deactivated username at Fastmail if I want to. That's not cool.
- swiley 6y agoMicrosoft sold my minecraft name to some xbox live player because I didn't play the game for a year. That's something I paid for!! It matches my HN name, my domain, the alias I use on IRC and discord etc. I'm still pissed about it.