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Comment by fhrow4484 | Hacker News Reader

The same happened to my old "...@hotmail.com" email, Microsoft deleted old childhood emails, still bitter about that.

Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail... , the limit is 365 days of inactivity.

Also a massive security hole. I needed to do a password reset on my old ebay account, but the hotmail account it was attached to was deleted, so I just created a new hotmail account with the same name, and reset my password. I've done this maybe three or four time, because I haven't used hotmail since high school, so they keep deleting it.

A lot of people also have password resets on gmail linked to their old hotmail accounts, so you can just re-create their old hotmail to hijack their current gmail.

Omg, yikes. Email is the universal "password reset" mechanism for the whole web too. Re-using emails sounds like a bad plan just from the start, surprised services allow that.

To be fair, email account providers - and particularly free ones like hotmail/yahoo/gmail - never agreed to be your partner providing banking/military grade security to the rest of your online accounts. Same as how your telco never agreed to have SMS be a secure protocol for 2FA or password resets.[1]

Far from being surprised free email services "allow reusing emails", I'm way more surprised that orgs like banks and PayPal and crypto exchanges allow using email or sms as "secure reset or 2FA" protocols.

1: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for-...

I've gotten bitten by Google locking me out of an account because I hadn't logged into it in a long time, and the device that I used to log into it was stolen long ago. Even though I have full access to the recovery email address on that account, because it's an unknown device, Google blocks me from accessing it.

In a similar way but a different mechanism, I also had the same thing happen with some accounts which I had opened up using my mobile phone number. I have struggled with mental illness throughout my life, and one of the things that can happen through crises in particular that can have vicious consequences is having no ability to regulate your behavior, in particular your finances, so you easily and quickly wrack up debt, cash out retirement accounts and blow through all that money, and being unable to pay your phone bill (or any other bill) leads you to losing that phone number, and any account which you access through that number.

The systems that we use as a society to authenticate identity for access to digital services and systems, is incredibly punishing to people who struggle with mental health issues. It's a bit of an own goal, since some of the potential solutions to it are potentially technical in nature rather than requiring legislative or societal action.

That said, the difficulties presented by the digital world to people who struggle with mental illness pale in comparison to those they face in the physical world, and how ineffective the society, governments, and medicine are at helping those people, sometimes hurting them in that process through lack of training, ability, and the flaws in the design of the overall systems.

Not just for people with mental illnesses, think about our aging population and anybody in general: there are too many signals to regulate a modern functional life, saying that it is stressful by design would be an understatement.

Definitely! A while back Yahoo! purged a ton of addresses and allowed individuals to signup with them to get unique/clean email handles.

I was able to grab myfirstname@yahoo.com. The address looks neat.

Since I’ve had that address, I’ve received password reset emails, bank documents, airline tickets and what not.

Massive security hole is an understatement.

The old yahoo chat days were my favourite internet days.

I used to have a great friendship with people in "Hackers Lounge: 1" and everyone used to be 1337 for cracking original names like you said.

I got my first name, and a few friends and I had illegals like \\//\\//estside and H a C K e R and .oO(d00t) which weren't compatible with the email service.

It's a pity that a generation later, the internet meant facebook and not the kind of inquisitive fun I experienced! (maybe I should have played more sport lol).

I used to know somebody who would take stuff from old abandoned neopets accounts that way. They would often have their email address in their neopets profile, it would be expired, he would make it and reset the password.

That's an absolute blast from the past.

I don't think Gmail allows this. I explicitly deleted all my old gmail addresses and moved back to my own mail servers in 2013 (due to Snowden/domestic spying .. sad how so few people did anything due to that) and I remember reading that once I deleted the e-mail address, I could never create it again. I made sure I had moved over all the accounts I cared about to my new e-mail address first.

This is true of Gmail, once an address or account is deleted by its owner that email address is gone for good.

You're actually talking about a different thing than parent. You can delete account data without recycling the account name. Nowadays, Microsoft still deletes inactive accounts, but they don't recycle the names.

Of course, phone numbers are recycled by telephone providers. So that'll be fun in a few years.

I guess my deceased dad's email was deleted(hotmail). I found an old email address of his and was trying to get into it just to reconnect since he died when I was a child. I get shouldn't see other people's stuff but still... would have been interesting as it was in the early 2000's that he was around. Would have liked to see how his mind operated. Afterall he was a successful person (eg. operating a 60ft yacht for several years) and he also referred to the handover of Hong Kong to China 1997 in recent context. I unfortunately did not inherit/learn that business savviness aspect. Seeing his emails would have been like time travel.

I had that Black Mirror thought to strip personality from data.

My reaction in a similar situation was to rather preserve his privacy. I don't know that mailboxes should be made available to relatives after one dies.

Yeah and it could go both ways. You can try to get something out of it or also what if you're tied to their problems(eg. debt) that would suck. But yeah TL;DR I don't really remember my own father so would be nice to see more of what his life was like.

Personally I think it would be fun if my son was interested in what’s in my emails after I’m dead. On the other hand, it’s all horribly mundane, so you’d quickly get bored.

My parents obsessively kept every family letter, the good, the bad, the sad, even the embarrassing. It's kind of a treasure trove for me. I get to see their take on events I remember. The letters go back well over a century.

For those who actually want to do this on Google, there is a tool called the Inactive Account Manager (not available for GSuite/Google Workspace):

https://myaccount.google.com/inactive

(More info: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546)

This utility allows you to give access to a variety of data to another user when your Google account becomes inactive for a configurable long period of time. It also allows you to send certain emails or whatever.

I recommend everyone who uses a Google account checks it out at the very least. It's a hell of a tool.

My father also died when I was a child, so I understand where you're coming from. I am now a father, and currently dealing with a serious illness, which has made me think about these things. I can say that my child finding my emails after I'm dead is something I definitely do not want to happen. I'm not sure how to handle it yet.

> I can say that my child finding my emails after I'm dead is something I definitely do not want to happen.

That makes sense(funny?), I suppose it is different if you have a relatively active/recent relationship. Hope the illness is worked out.

Also yeah, it is your own private details I get that, I wouldn't ask my friend if I could see their email. Just in my case it was the only potential record of my dad's thoughts.

That has to be why they call it office 365.

Well it's certainly not the uptime!

haha.... :'(

I guess there is some measure of uptime every day?

Do they have to change the branding on leap years?

In a weird way, it's kinda comforting that other people have felt this. I spent ten (!) years trying to recover my childhood e-mail address which got hacked when I was a kid (password was 1123456789, lol). It was only this year that I _finally_ got to a human support agent who could verify my ID and told me that the account was completely wiped.

It was a bittersweet moment, for sure.

Hmm.. that sounds like my password.

I should go change it.

> I should go change it.

Too late!

(Seriously, folks, change your password first, then post!)

"Amazing! I've got the same on my luggage!"

What a weird era when we record everything but also let it all get deleted/not be looked at. Maybe curation-on-creation was the right model after all.

Ha! I came here to say the same. THE reason I have never used my hotmail for something serious is that they deleted a lot of my childhood memories in that deletion... I opened my Hotmail account around 1998, and they just deleted all of my memories.

They deleted everything after a long backpacking trip. I'm still bitter.

Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...

after 30 days!

I lost my personal domain from this. I didn't log in to my hotmail email for 30 days (2006) and they closed my account. Then they let someone else register my email, which they used to steal my domain. No recourse.

Haven't used MS services since then if I can avoid it.

Same - many years of emails just gone. That experience is what made me start archiving all my email locally (simply Thunderbird with IMAP + routine Time Machine backups).

It's why I use POP wherever possible.

Likewise, so many amazing memories lost. I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online.

> I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online.

This is the video that comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4

To give a little perspective, I basically don't have any pre-Yahoo/Google email history. So maybe going back 20 years or so and not much in the way of digital archives before about 10 years before that. Essentially nothing from BBS days, email on various proprietary systems, etc. Some shards here and there from the 1980s and a few things that were digitized prior.

I'm not sure if it's good or bad (probably a bit of both) that much of my early time online is largely gone--and I didn't have a significant time "online" before I was about 20 or so.

I have email from when I got my college email address in the late 90s, but I still can't find email from earlier, when I had a couple different addresses that I'd gotten from my local dial-up ISP. I was always -- even then, when hard drive space was expensive -- pretty good about keeping old data as I moved from machine to machine, so it really bums me out that I can't find that old stuff.

I have a collection of Eudora backups still kicking around (an old Mac OS9 and earlier vintage mail client). I don't have a _good_ way to read them any more (but at least I can grep them when I want to hunt an old email down... I've done that maybe twice in the last decade...)

For the 2000s, I do have an Outlook .pst somewhere I could probably find for work email. But I've probably pretty much exported any docs I care about from that era and likely wouldn't go to the trouble of digging anything else out.

I think I dumped a backup of my Juno emails (90s offline dial-up email for kids with parents too cheap to shell out for internet) but it's probably on some obsolete media like a Zip drive somewhere. Probably for the best.

Yeah, at the time I archived a bunch of MSN messenger chats, and looking back at those now is fantastic. Unfortunately it’s the only thing I have left. There must be a DVD somewhere with my my documents folder from 2004, but it’s lost to time.

A short time ago I finally found my Geocities webpage (from 1999) in the archive just by chance [It is in Spanish]:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010718195237/http://www.geocit...

It was a blast from the past for me, amazing times for the internet.

When Outlook.com was first made available as a mail domain back in 2012, I immediately went and registered a few accounts, figuring that it would become a high-profile service pretty quickly. One of them I have almost never used, and in its eight-year lifespan it's received...(checks)...7 emails. All of which were from Microsoft.

That account is still up, though, and I don't believe I've checked it from the website itself in years, although it is one of the accounts I've linked to my Outlook app. So the mere act of polling an account for email might be enough to be considered "active".

I haven't checked what would happen if I did the same polling but only used Thunderbird instead.

If IMAP only usage was considered inactive I’d have lost my gmail and hotmail accounts over a decade ago.

Startup idea: SaaS that you register you email addresses and periodically does an IMAP request to keep them active. Premium tier would provide actual archiving of your emails.

Yuk. What use is a SaaS for archiving when it's just going to "sun set" in 6 months after the owners sell it to Google?

If it wasn't for the "this service would need access to my email account creds and therefore to all my mail" showstopper...

A distributed service where a group of people all have their own service to "ping" their personal "important accounts", and which accept federation with friends or other users of the service, so if your server/vps/serverless/whatever platform instance goes down your pings still happen from your connected servers.

Elevator pitch: "Like IPFS, but for cron jobs calling curl."

I still have an old @msn.com email address, I remember at the time you could choose from @hotmail.com, @msn.com or @passport.com. Haven't used it for email for at least a decade, but I do use it for OneDrive so my account stays "active".

Ha, passport.com. Thx for the memories.

Never trust cloud providers for archival data I think is the lesson. Keep your own storage for that.

Same with Fastmail, which used to have free accounts, but (permanently) deactivated them after 120 days of inactivity:

https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...

I just found that I can re-register my deactivated username at Fastmail if I want to. That's not cool.

I lost my free Hotmail account of almost a decade when the limit was 30 days.

Yeah, that 30-day window was ridiculous. I lost my hotmail in 2006 after exclusively using gmail for 6 weeks. I'd like to know the origins of the policy. Who decided that if someone goes a few weeks without checking their email that they're either dead or no longer interested in using the internet?

It was a different MS back then, cloud services were still new, and companies were still figuring it out. Maybe the reasoning was to keep people afraid from using hotmail alternatives in fear of losing their accounts.

Or less charitably, they were trying to sell the premium accounts where that doesn’t happen.

Found this source from Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...

Microsoft sold my minecraft name to some xbox live player because I didn't play the game for a year.

That's something I paid for!! It matches my HN name, my domain, the alias I use on IRC and discord etc. I'm still pissed about it.

That's funny because I moved from Hotmail to Gmail because they did exactly that to my account. Luckily, I know better now and pay $$ for my own mail box and storage.

When Yahoo bought rocmketmail the same happened to me but I think it was 6 months

M$ used to delete HoTMaiL emails after 2w inactivity in the early 2000s. Back when the limit was 20MB.

Heh I remember when they changed the 6MB limit to 2MB

The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL").

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