When I read this news early this morning, my heart dropped to my stomach. You know the kind of feeling! Thousands of people have reported that their Hotmail accounts have been wiped out some time between 31st Dec 2010 to 1st Jan, 2011, and all that’s left in the email account is the “greeting” email that’s standard to new email accounts.
While Hotmail does deactivate some accounts that have no activity within a certain period of time, these users are using Hotmail as their primary email, like myself, and it is really appalling that email can get lost just like that, especially from a “trusted” major provider like Microsoft.
Over the years, I have lost two email accounts previously, when it was no longer economically viable for the providers to offer free email. I have lost a lot of email, contacts, photos and other important stuff that come through email. But I never thought that this could happen with a Microsoft property.
I remember facing some trouble logging in to Hotmail some times but to have entire content in an email account missing, accounts that have stayed active some for as long as ten years, is just too much to stomach. Imagine, there would be thousands and thousands of email which can never be recreated.
What is worse than losing email is that Microsoft has yet to issue an official statement on this and has not given any time line when this would be resolved. Also, all who are affected would like to know one thing: Is it possible to retrieve all the lost data in their Hotmail accounts?