Answer
- Hotmail – 120 days. “Free Windows Live Hotmail accounts become inactive if you don’t sign in for 120 days, or within the first 10 days after signing up for an account.
- After an account becomes inactive, all messages, folders, and contacts are deleted, but the account name is still reserved.
How to Recover Hotmail Account
Do Hotmail accounts expire?
Hotmail accounts stay active as long as you keep your account current. You can cancel your account at any time, and it will be deleted after 30 days if you don’t log in.
If you can log in to your Hotmail account, then it is active. If you cannot log in, then the account has been deactivated.
Microsoft does not delete old Hotmail accounts. They are still available for use, but many of the features are no longer supported.
Hotmail is owned by Microsoft, and it is unclear what happens to old Hotmail accounts. It is possible that Microsoft deletes them after a certain amount of time, but the company does not provide much information about this. If you are worried about an old Hotmail account, the best thing to do is to contact Microsoft directly for more information.
You can’t. Microsoft closed the old Hotmail accounts in December 2012. You can create a new account with Outlook or Windows Live Mail, but it won’t have the same email address as your old one.
Hotmail and Outlook are not the same. Hotmail is an email service that was established in 1996, while Outlook is a program for managing email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, and other personal information.
Yes, Outlook does delete inactive accounts. This is done to maintain the performance of the application and to keep your inbox from getting cluttered with old messages.
Email servers store emails for a set period of time. This is usually determined by the email providers and can be anywhere from days to years.