What is going on with these clowns? For years I used Hotmail because... well it worked. New stuff came along that was probably better but whatever... my trusty old hotmail accounts did the trick and I didn't want to do some massive migration, tell all my contacts, etc...
 
So about a couple years ago they switched to outlook and because I hadn't logged in for a while they wiped out my main account. Over a decade of contacts and communications lost. WTF? So I got over that but just now I had to do something with a more recent account I created just before the change to Outlook (I never would have created it if I knew what they were going to do). I know I've used this account recently but I guess they've done another massive change. Now it's some kind of Microsoft store account. I don't want or need that crap. All my products are licensed and if I needed to buy something from them it's not like it's hard to find them... like EVERYWHERE. It was an email account for chrissake! I ran around chasing down all these ridiculous security codes they were sending to other accounts, it REFUSED to let me go to my inbox until I found some link hidden at the bottom of this new Store Account page and when I finally did all my contacts and emails had yet again been deleted.
 
What the hell are these guys doing?!
 
Anyway... the point is the account in question was the one I used to communicate with some of you guys offsite so if that is the case it's dead and if you sent me anything recently it was never received and completely deleted.
 
Loving all the messages from MS as I screwed with this telling me how much they are "Helping" me by doing this crap. Perfect example of a monolithic company being so completely separated and oblivious to what the real consumer on the street needs from their products.
 
And yes I'm aware hotmail has sucked for a veeeery long time and should have dropped them ages ago but it worked for my needs. Just never in a million years thought they would be so insane as to pull this kind of crap. It makes no sense.
 
/angry "old" guy rant

That is the problem with storing anything in the cloud, you are not in control. You could, and probably should, back up your email account locally, or run an account that downloads everything (or copies of everything) to your hard drive. Thunderbird has a very good search feature that can find a single item in a database of thousands quickly, and it is now pretty easy to configure for a Hotmail POP account. You can set it to leave copies on the server if you need to access items from a different location.
 
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Hotmail

Beepster
And yes I'm aware hotmail has sucked for a veeeery long time and should have dropped them ages ago but it worked for my needs. 

Sorry to hear about your troubles, Beep. 
 
As much as I hate Outlook and its glitches, I've been using my Hotmail account as my de facto e-mail address for almost 15 years and never had any serious issue. 
 
As with everything, successful developers reach a point where you wish they'd just leave things alone. But they don't...
 
If I were rich, I'd buy a few dozens current Mac and have those running Mountain Lion and never upgrade a thing, ever again. These days, when it comes to OS and e-mail and utilities, technology seems to take a mostly counterproductive turn from my perpective, in terms of my needs. 
 
Outlook didn't do a thing for me. I'd revert to my old, simple Hotmail any day if I could.

@slartabartfast...
 
Yeah, I've always shied away from email clients for personal use for multiple reasons (always on different machines, don't want to store it, was too stupid to really understand and manage them, etc) but used them extensively at work for many years (set up by someone else and us grunts just used it). For most of my clownery it doesn't matter and this is just an annoyance/time waster more than anything but I'm definitely going to have to get a proper set up very soon. I've just started using Gmail for stuff but even they are always screwing around with crap so who knows what'll happen there.
 
Soon enough I'll have my own domain which I'll set up emails for but that could still screw up if I let it. I've also been pondering making use of the emails provided by my ISP but those get lost if I ever switch to another provider and I have no idea whether it'll be any good in the first place.
 
It really does seem simple though. If someone has an email account registered they probably DON'T want you to delete all their crap. I'd be less ticked if they said "Nah, you're a deadbeat douchbag who doesn't check his account so we decided to save some server space and delete your crap". Not "We're HELPING!!! THANK US!!".
 
Gotta love marketing doublespeak.

Rain

Beepster
And yes I'm aware hotmail has sucked for a veeeery long time and should have dropped them ages ago but it worked for my needs. 

Sorry to hear about your troubles, Beep. 
 
As much as I hate Outlook and its glitches, I've been using my Hotmail account as my de facto e-mail address for almost 15 years and never had any serious issue. 
 
As with everything, successful developers reach a point where you wish they'd just leave things alone. But they don't...
 
If I were rich, I'd buy a few dozens current Mac and have those running Mountain Lion and never upgrade a thing, ever again. These days, when it comes to OS and e-mail and utilities, technology seems to take a mostly counterproductive turn from my perpective, in terms of my needs. 
 
Outlook didn't do a thing for me. I'd revert to my old, simple Hotmail any day if I could.

Hiya, Rain. Thanks and it is my own "fault" I guess for not always logging in or whatever it is they want me to do.
 
The weirdest thing though about today was even after I bounced around between the linked accounts to swipe the confrim codes once I got into the account there was no readily apparent way to get at my inbox. Is this not normal?
 
Usually there would be a link that sends me to my inbox either through my profile name or somewhere at the top of the page but it was some vaguely labeled link at the bottom of the page buried in with a ton of MS links. It was really weird.
 
Anyway... doesn't matter. They wiped all my stuff so that's that. It's of no use to me anymore. I'm not really a regular email checker so if they want to penalize me for that then it just ain't the service for me. I'm however going to have to go through all my records though to see what I have registered where and with what as far as product accounts and stuff in case this turns into an accoutn access problem. I've already migrated a lot of stuff that I need access to regularly away from HM but there are MANY things still registered with those accounts. It will be time consuming.
 
Cheers.

My first email account was Hotmail and I switched to Gmail for my personal account as soon as it came out in 2004 or so (even managed to snag my proper name without any extra characters, I was so early). But I kept my Hotmail account because it was on a lot of guitar transcriptions that I have online, and I really enjoyed reading through the emails I got from around the world.

Then at some point it got hacked by Nigerian scam artists (I know this because they emailed everyone in my contacts list). They changed the password and locked me out. I jumped through hoops with Microsoft getting control of that account back, but I did it eventually. Changed the password to 32 characters of gibberish and guess what? A couple of months later it was hacked again. This time it took me a good 5 years of trying before I got it back. Microsoft does not make it easy these days and I went through much of the same frustrations, Beepster. Their system is horribly confusing and you really don't know where you are. I felt like I was chasing my tail. By some miracle however I got it back a couple of years ago when they switched to Outlook.com. I don't know if that had anything to do with it. It's nice to have it back but predictably, all of my mails and contacts were gone. It's sad because my first ever email communications were in there, it's like losing an old photo album.

Hi, sharke. That sucks and I think a lot of the security breaches with HM is why they did a lot of this stuff. Once again though it's like they are trying to emulate the things that work for their competitors (the impression I got just now was some bizzarro mish mash of the Apple and Google accoutn models) but failing miserably at it.
 
It feels like it's such a huge company that has so many various teams that all this stuff gets thrown against the wall, and individually they might be good ideas based on consumer input, but at the end of the day it turns into the "Homer" car. That final step of siphoning out the silly stuff and making sure it actually makes sense for the end user gets completely overlooked and this is what we get. Crazy.
 
It really is sad too because MS has such a massive talent pool and are capable of great things. I wish they would stop trying to keep up with the proverbial "Jones'" and get back to developing logical, useful tools and innovations in house.
 
Where the heck is Bill? Get your minions under control, dude!

a) I have my own domain, those emails are forwarded to my isp's email account.
b) my isp email is web based. I've been with them since 2002. Have not lost an email yet (other than pilot error). 
 
Not sure what that means, but I have to post sumpin' roight?

bapu
a) I have my own domain, those emails are forwarded to my isp's email account.
b) my isp email is web based. I've been with them since 2002. Have not lost an email yet (other than pilot error). 
 
Not sure what that means, but I have to post sumpin' roight?

I just need to start being a little SMRTer. It's a massive endeavor.
 
Turns out computers WEREN'T just a fad. Who knew?

I've been programming since 1978 (professionally coded in Fortran, Cobol and HP Basic within the first four years).
 
I've built at least 100 PC/Servers in that time.
 
They still seem like a fad to me.