I got my HotHomailmail address back today, seven months and two days after it got hacked. I’ve tried to log in every day since then because Hotmail addresses usually expire after ninety days of inactivity (sometimes sooner). Anyway, mine didn’t- maybe the hacker was logging in every once in a while to keep it active, who knows.
So, every day I’ve been making deliberate bad login attempts with passwords like thanksfornothingmicrosoftthisaccounthasbeenhijackedandyoudontcare. I’ve been doing this until Hotmail says ‘Too many incorrect login attempts- this account has been temporarily locked’. Eventually this is all that would happen, even after one attempt. Hotmail had put a permanent lock on the account. Well, apparently not that permanent, because when I tried this morning it just told me that the account didn’t exist. I almost fell over. A few seconds later I had signed up and now I own gregorwright [at] hotmail [dot] com again. Now I’m going to use it to email Microsoft once a day, thanking them for their swift customer support response.