Technology & Social Media Hotmail/Outlook - emails gone.

Hi - dummy question
Hoping someone IT savvy can shed some light on what has happened here. I've have a hotmail account for 17 years. It had something like 55000 emails in it. Logged on recently and I have 15000 emails. I did not delete any. I believe Hotmail changed to Outlook a few years ago - this disappearance of emails has only happened in the last 2 months.

Where did they go? Why would I not have been notified that I would have x date to reduce emails by or back them up? I have lost all my correspondance from PMs. If I did not delete - who accessed my account and did?
???? TIA

 

Particulalry an issue when one decides to go paperless bills too.

 

Bills should be downloaded. How do you do your tax return?

 

I go to ninemsn homepage and then click outlook. (The direct outlook icon on my homescreen takes me direct to my work outlook account). I type in username and password.
There are only 18 items in my deleted folder when I did as you suggested.

On my phone I press the envelope icon and this goes direct to my hotmail/outlook account. There have been times when some emails would be on my computer but not show up on my phone.

 

Assuming it is all lost.
What is best moving forward? I guess Google and I get acquainted while I learn how to back up my emails and save them to a hard drive.

 

Y-man thanks for helping. I may have figured it out? I sorted emails from old to new and some from 2008 came up which is good. When you said look at the sent ones - I see it had a number 2 - then I recall a work colleague telling me the number in bold is the number of emails not read. So I potentiallt have 15000 unread emails but my other 40000 may still be there. Anyways I guess I better start sorting through them and backing up.
Any tips on saving emails? I have a 1TB external harddrive and was going to sort, file and save.

 

Phew! @Owlet. Stress attack!

I also have hotmail/outlook and I have some important emails in there. For anything tax, I download, save and back up. But there are others not backed up. If you find out how to do it, could you please post?

 

Stepping back - it is important to note that if you have "free" email there are ultimately no expectations on retention. There is also a real risk that a small issue could mean your data is gone.

The second thing is to remember that email is not an archival solution, many people use it this way but unless you go out of your way - it is not suitable for this. It isn't suitable at work and certainly not at home.

That being said, I do use my home email as an archive but I do back up archives (in my case by year) to different backup locations.

So, in short, don't rely on it.

 

You the terradata thing that all ISPs and telcos have to keep copies of your data etc Maybe, you can retrieve lost emails through them? Just a guess.

 

I have office with outlook @The Y-man. I mever set it up with hotmail though. Sounds like maybe I should. Thanks for the info.

 

Not sure if this will help but when you are viewing Hotmail via the browser, go to the Inbox screen & check whether it is split into "Focused" and "Other". If it is, and you don't want it split up like this, go to the down arrow next to "Filter" and uncheck "Show Focused Inbox".

Also yes as per another post in this thread the number in bold next to "Inbox" is usually the number of unread emails, not the total number of emails.

 

Thanks - that tip helped. I wondered why it did the focussed /other thing.
Perthguy - haven't worked out an easy way yet.

 

Glad to hear it!
I guess the folks at Microsoft thought it would be a useful feature to foist onto everyone haha.

 

I hate it and switched it off immediately.

 

Maybe I should have put quotes around "useful"...