Windows 10 How to Recover a Forgotten Hotmail Password Without Security Questions

I've been through this several times with my Students as well as Customers. You should be aware of the fact that Microsoft had a conversion deadline for all Hotmail users like 5/6 years ago, and Hotmail users were forced to switch to another Microsoft E-mail account type such as Outlook.com (that's what I converted to from my old Hotmail account), or a Microsoft Live ID Email. This occurred way back in 2010 or 2011. Of course many Hotmail deadline NOTICES were sent out via E-mail from Microsoft for several months. Some folks like me, who had like 8 different E-mail addresses missed the deadline, and I lost all my years of Hotmail. This wasn't too bad, as I had it backed up on my Yahoo! and other E-mail accounts which I've maintained since 1999. Many Customers were annoyed with this and left for other webmail providers entirely such as Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL webmail E-mail.

I'm writing this not just to explain to you, but for our other forum users who get frustrated with trying to recover their Hotmail accounts which have long since gone bye-bye. Another thing you need to find out from your friend was when was the last time She logged into her Hotmail account and used it? The limitation here is that if one doesn't log into their Hotmail account AT LEAST ONCE EVERY 90 DAYS, the account is inactivated and archived on Microsoft's backup servers. The archives are kept by Microsoft for 3 years (at least they used to). Which means that if your friend has used her account since 2013, but just is locked out and or it's been deactivated due to lack of use it's possible to call Microsoft and pay to have her E-mails reconstituted into another NEW E-mail account such as Outlook.com or Microsoft LiveID (in Win10 this is called "Win10 Native Mail). Charges vary on this from about $39 to several hundred dollars. In my experience, very few home users have stuff in their old E-mail accounts valuable enough to spend this kind of money to recover their old E-mails, or the cost of an archive search and account reactivation or account transfer. Maybe 1 in a 100 do this. The ones who do this either have irreplaceable family photos in their E-mails, or Tax Documents, or business-related items that may be from a now defunct business they operated.

So you know, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and the other guys all used to keep their E-mail archives or backups for 5 years; but due to the burgeoning cost of keeping hundreds of millions and now billions of E-mail accounts backed up they have all decreased this. I believe the 3 I mentioned only keep their account archives for 18 months now. I've heard rumors that that will change and may go to 12 months or less. At last count; Gmail was approaching 700 million E-mail users worldwide and is now the largest provider of free E-mail accounts. The other guys aren't far behind that.

The bad news scenario for your friend that is if she hasn't logged into her Hotmail account PRIOR to 2013 (2012 or before), she is pretty much out of luck. Even attempting to pay Microsoft to recover her account in this situation will not be possible for any price! Sorry! This is because Microsoft purges all E-mail accounts after 3 years as I said above.

You can post back what year she last used her Hotmail account, and I can reply back with her options if you like.

Hope that explains things for you.

Best of luck to you and your friend,
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