Hotmail - suspended account
 

'Er Indoors has had her Hotmail account "suspended" by Microshaft and is not able to satisfy the faceless ops that she is who she is and it is her account. There is no explanation/reason for the suspension. The more frustrating effect of this is that her Messenger is also disabled which cocks up her work (she mans a distributed telephone helpdesk in which the helpers use messenger to talk to each other while keeping the customer on the phone).

One of the issues is that the mail account has been running for many years, since before account security questions were as mature as they are today. The other issue is that MS will only send her a reset password to an email account on record with them and we don't have the account at NTL anymore .......

So she has a stream of automated messages from MS telling her that she has not supplied sufficient info but not telling her what info is incomplete/wrong/required. They have asked for copies of recent mails sent out with who,when,content,attachment info but this info is all locked up in her sent mail folder which she can't access......

Talk about Catch 22.

Any ideas?

Can she ask Microsoft to close the account the free up the email address associated with the account, she can then open a new account with the original email. Any saved mail will be gone .

With most email services, you can't open another account with a previously used name.

Someone probably brute-forced her password and used her account to send out spam/phishing/fraud emails..... Microsoft probably got an influx of complaints, and as it the usual case chopped off her account with no further warning as per the TOS.

Chances of her being able to do anything about it ? None.

You get what you pay for in this life. Perhaps it's time to look at hosting your email somewhere you pay someone for it, at least then you get a phone number you can shout and scream down.

we have "several paid" for email accounts but it always pays to keep a couple of free accounts to catch spam in. It is just a pity that microshaft have associated messenger with Hotmail in this way. When Hotmail belonged to themselves it was not an issue.

Rans6......

You aren't obliged to use Messenger with a hotmail address, and never have.

Personally one of my first tasks on setting up a new machine is to uninstall Messenger ! :E