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Hotmail is currently the largest free web-based email service and has over 270 million users (2008). On any given day, a significant number of those users will forget their password and be unable to recover it, and this just happened to me, with a Hotmail account that I recently created with a password that I didn't write down because it was 'easy for me to remember'!
Well the passage of time and death of a few million brain cells said otherwise, and after accidentally wiping the password in Outlook Connector I was unable to get into the account.
Password recovery in Hotmail requires you to go through one of two procedures. Either you enter the location-specific information that you originally input when you created the account (and i could not remember these details) or you generate a 'recover your password' email from Hotmail to the alternative email address that you should have set up when you created the account. In my hurry to set up the account, I hadn't provided an alternative email address! So I generated the recovery email which was delivered to the blocked Hotmail address, which of course I couldn't sign on to.
According to Google search results there is no solution to this dilemma. All you can do is abandon that email address and set up another one, remembering to add that all-important alternative email address.
However I finally found a solution that worked for me, and if you are using Outlook to send and receive messages in Hotmail, it may work for you. First I rolled back the pc to a restore point before the date that I lost the password. Magically the Hotmail account sprang into life in Outlook and I was able to reply to the recovery email in the Inbox, create a new password for Hotmail and set up an alternative email address, just in case this ever happens again on a bad day! Once this was done, I re-applied the latest software updates to bring the machine back to its current state.
Finally a great sigh of relief and a welcome cup of tea as emails started to fill the inbox. |