Email deactivated?

In my old job I had a Hotmail email which was reserved only for official communications. It’s been 18 months since I quit but today I had a need to use that email account again. All my efforts have gone in vain because Hotmail keeps telling me that the email is deactivated and no longer available. I really want this Hotmail email again because I am expecting an important message. Is there a way I can get it back?
Danny Plumb

If you haven’t logged in at the free Hotmail account in more than 90 days, the email would be deactivated! Or, to put it more correctly, the account will be closed by the service and all the messages (and other information) will be deleted.

So if your email address has expired, is there a way to get it back? Would you be able to own the account once again? There is no direct answer to this question. The email address in question may or may not be available… and we’ll get into this in a moment.

Email deactivation period

All free services will deactivate the email account and remove all content if you don’t log in at least once during the specified time period. In case of both Hotmail and Gmail, this period of inactivity is about 9 months (270 days). Yahoo Mail subscribers have a mere 4 months.

Anyway, if you have failed to sign in at least once during this time, you will lose the email account. The only way to get it back is to make the hotmail email account once again and hope (and pray) that the old username (user ID) would not be in use.

All email address have the format USERNAME@DOMAIN. On free email services such as Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo, the username is what differentiates your email from others; thus, no two people can have the same user ID.

So head off to the registration page and create your Hotmail account again by filling up the online registration form. Remember to enter the same username that you had. And if you are indeed lucky and get the email address back, please understand that the account will be blank. All stored messages and contacts information would have been deleted long back.