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Your particular problem is most probably their policy of deleting all emails after a certain period of inactivity (90 days if I remember correctly), happened to me too once..

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I find this absurd in this era of cheap storage. Blatantly anti-consumer.

Don't you think it's a bit over the top to call the lack of a feature on a free service blatantly anti-consumer?

Microsoft's online services division loses $100M-$200M each quarter.

Google retains the data indefinitely because it's in their best interests not because of their dedication to the user. Why else would they retain even what the user deletes?

Deleting data from a large scale system I'd actually pretty difficult, since the whole system has been designed NOT to lose data (redundant copies, caches, multiple data centres, backups).

FWIW, my understanding is that Hotmail is not part of the online services division (which is Bing plus MSN), but rather the Windows division (that's why it's "Windows Live Hotmail"). Don't ask me why.

The period supposedly is 270 days now, according to this Hotmail Dev team "interview":

>> we have a policy of deleting emails after 270 days

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ej32l/we_are_the_hotma... (do a search for "270" on the page to find the quote)

Although I have no idea when they changed it to 270 - it can't have been that long ago.

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