Do you have a Hotmail email account? If so, you may want to ensure you’ve recently updated your security questions and alternate email contact for the account, or you could risk losing it.
You see, I’ve been a big fan of Hotmail over the past two decades. My very first email address was a Microsoft Hotmail account and I say “was” because a week or so ago, they took it away from me.
I had used that account since its creation. It was both my personal and professional freelance account. I had 20 years’ worth of emails, pictures and documents saved in that account. All the information for my contacts was stored there, as was the final goodbye email from my close cousin who died from cancer.
Unfortunately, I neglected to change the 20-year-old (or so) security question and also changed jobs in the past year. My old job’s email address was the alternate contact for my Hotmail account and I never altered that when I changed employment. Do you see where I’m going with this?
A little more than a week ago, I was writing an email, when my computer suddenly rebooted automatically. Afterwards, when I attempted to go back into my Hotmail account, it was under the impression that someone was trying to hack into it and asked me to verify my identity.
Unfortunately, the only way Hotmail wants me to identify myself is by answering a 20-year-old security question. It also asks me to input email addresses of people I regularly email and exact subject lines of emails I’ve sent. Who knows that stuff? I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, let alone something that’s 20-years-old. The Microsoft website helpfully tells you to contact the people you email to get the info needed to unblock your account, however since most of my work is done through email, and I can’t access contact info… it’s a bit of a problem.
So, I contacted Microsoft support online. The conversation basically had the support person tell me I needed to either A) Use the alternate email to get a code to unblock my account or B) Fill in the questionnaire with the 20-year-old questions and info I can’t remember or access. When I explained that neither option A or B would work, I would get “So, have you tried option A?” “What about Option B?” “Ah, so we can’t help you, sorry.”
I then tried using social media to get some help and attention, “Tweeting” at the Microsoft Support crew about my issue.
“Have you tried Option A?”
“Have you tried Option B?”
“Ah, sorry we can’t help you.”
So, I tweeted some more (mostly about not being able to get help) and offer my blood, DNA or first born child as proof of my identity. Finally, I get a tweet back from Microsoft saying “Contact us privately and we will work on verifying your identity and get your account back to you.”
So, I followed their instructions and contacted a member of the support team.
“So, have you tried option A?”
“Have you tried option B?”
“Ah, so sorry, we cannot help you.”
At no time did I actually speak to a human being (it was all through online chat) and, to tell you the truth, I suspect I was talking to a “bot” or automated support robot, rather than a real living and breathing human being.
It’s a bit disappointing because for more than 20 years I’ve been a loyal Hotmail user. Even when all my friends abandoned the email service for something else and chastised me for using such an “old” service, I hung on, insisting it was still better than anything else. But after 20 years, I lost everything. Losing the goodbye email from my cousin hurts the most.
However, after sharing my story with friends, family and people around Squamish, I heard so many similar Hotmail horror stories that I started to feel a little better. It seemed that almost everyone I spoke to had a similar experience of losing at least one Hotmail account to their draconian and inflexible retrieval procedure. And, like all those folks, I’ve now had to spend almost two weeks to migrate my life to another service (I won’t be opening a new Hotmail account any time soon).
The moral of the story is, make sure your own email security and contact info is kept up to date regularly, or you too could risk losing a big chunk of your life.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
