This exact thing happened to me in 2005 - I lost 7 years of emails from high school, college, between myself and several girlfriends, chat logs I'd saved from IRC, photos, and other important notes. I was incredibly pissed and immediately stopped using hotmail for anything, including changing all my other accounts everywhere else to not use hotmail as a backup email address.

It was unbelievable to me then that they would delete your email after 30 (?) days of inactivity, and it's unbelievable to me now, especially after Gmail changed the game for them in 2004 by essentially saying that diskspace is a commodity and you can therefore store as much as you want with them (within reason) for as long as you want.

Sure, there are things in the ToS that cover Google's ass, but no Google engineer in his right mind would write code that automatically deletes someone's email after a predetermined (way too short) time period. There would be too many alarm bells going off in their head, they'd talk about it with the team, and they'd make the right call. Something tells me that with Hotmail, it was just an exec somewhere looking at a balance sheet and trickling an order down the waterfall so the revenue looks nicer.

Jaded, but goddamnit.