If you’re told that the account doesn’t exist when you attempt to sign in, you can attempt to create it right then and there. Other services have other timelines.īut there’s one other straw to grasp at. At this writing, Microsoft states that you must log in to your (aka Hotmail) account at least once a year. The amount of time it takes for an email service to decide an account has been abandoned varies. If that’s happened, it’s not your email address anymore. If you haven’t accessed the account in a long time - say months or even years - most email providers assume you’ve abandoned the account, and delete it.īy deleting it, I mean they remove everything the account used to have, and make the email address available for someone new to take it as their own. Many aspects of attempting to recover an old account are similar to those covered in my article on hacked accounts: Email Hacked? 7 Things You Need to Do NOW. If this fails, you cannot recover the account. Follow the instructions to attempt to prove you are the rightful owner of the account and deserve to regain access to it. That means using the “Forgot my password” link in the dialog shown above. The only option then is to attempt to recover the account using the techniques provided by Microsoft.
I’m assuming, since you came to me, you can’t log in. When it comes to recovering your old Hotmail account, your options are few.įirst, go to - the new home for Hotmail and all other Microsoft email accounts - and try to log in with it.
That service would email you a password reset link to the old email address you no longer have access to. If you can’t log in to this other online service for some reason, you would ask for password recovery assistance, perhaps similar to the “Lost your password?” link in the example form above. The fact that you can log in to another online service using that email address as an identifier has nothing to do with whether or not that email address still exists. A login form that takes either username or email. Some sites use usernames, some use email addresses. You’re telling this other online service who you are, and they happen to use email addresses as a way to identify you. Email as an identifierĪll the email address is now is an identifier. Today, it only means you may have problems in the future should that second account ever get hacked. All it means is that the email address was yours, and was active at the time you set up the other online account.īack then, you probably had to respond to some kind of confirmation sent to that address in order to activate that second online account. Just because you can still use that email address to log in to another online account doesn’t mean that the email account still exists or is in use. There’s a very important misunderstanding here that I want to clear up.
In the New Search Folder dialog box, select and highlight the Old mail in the Select a search Folder: box. In Outlook 2010/2013/2016, please click the Folder > New Search Folder.Ģ. In Outlook 2007, please click the File > New > Search Folder.ī. Open the New Search Folder dialog box as right screenshot shown:Ī. The following step-by-step tutorial will help you create a search folder and group all messages that are older than your specified period.ġ.