Can I recover Hotmail messages deleted by Microsoft?

Q Soon after my son’s birth I created a Hotmail account for him, with the idea that I’d surprise him with it on his 18th birthday. Since then I’ve sent him numerous milestone messages and photos from ‘Dad’. Recently, I logged into his account to look through it, only to find nothing. I checked all folders — all empty! I contacted Microsoft and spoke to various friendly techs who concluded that my messages were deleted and irretrievable, due to “inactivity on the account”.

There was no warning email or notification that was going to happen, and I’m very upset about the loss. Have you come across this before? Is there anything at all I can do? Jeffrey Bonham

A Yes, we’ve come across this before, because it’s part of Microsoft’s long-standing services policy ( www.snipca.com/21748). That document runs to tens of thousands of words but the pertinent part (4.a.ii) states that if you don’t log into your Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) account at least once a year, it’ll be closed and the content deleted (see screenshot above).

Microsoft’s corporate archiving methods and policies are an internal affair, so we can’t comment on what is and isn’t actually possible. We’d be amazed if your messages were genuinely beyond the company’s reach, at least in principle. The chances are that they’re now archived in a long-term data-storage vault, somewhere in Microsoft’s depths.

However, they’re practically irretrievable because the information has no value to the company: Microsoft makes no profit by keeping old email accounts active for the best part of two decades. Perhaps if you turned up at the company’s HQ with £10, then Microsoft would magically find a way to open the vault and dig them out. That’s the harsh reality of your situation.

However, we can offer one small beacon of hope. You sent all these messages, so they might be found elsewhere. The originals might be in your email program’s Sent folder on your Windows PC, for example. Or, if you used a different webmail service to send them — such as Gmail — you might find them in the Sent folder there.