I’ve had the same e-mail account for a few years now, via MSN hotmail (yeah, just the free account). Suddenly, about a week ago, it stopped working. E-mails are getting bounced back to my friends, and I don’t even get spam anymore. It went from a few dozen spams and half a dozen legit e-mails a day to zero. Just for the record, I never used the account for anything weird – simply ordinary e-mail correspondence. Any idea why? Could this be some weird virus type of thing? Is someone else getting my e-mails?
Did you empty your inbox and other folders of unneeded messages? There’s a 2 MB cap on storage space. Sometimes a sudden deluge of spam (or viral attachments running 100K+ each) can put you over the top even if you are pretty careful.
MS-Hotmail encourages you to pay extra for more storage space. I personally prefer to use free software like Hotmail Popper, which checks and downloads your Hotmail when you check your other e-mail accounts, and deletes it from your Hotmail account. This solution won’t work for some people, who specifically want to be able to check their mail using a web browser instead of an e-mail program (e.g. if they generally read their hotmail at a library or coffee shop, instead of a laptop or home computer.)
Yep, I’m only at about 30% of my storage capacity. Right now, my inbox has 2 messges, and zero in my junkmail. I do have about 40 in another folder, but I’m nowhere near the 2MB cap.
What may have happened is someone was using your Hotmail address for sending Spam and it got on M$N’s list for abuse.
I get bounced Spam back to my account that I know I didn’t send.
You can TRY their support link, though it’s never been very useful to me. I usually get form letters or they give me answers to questions I never asked and don’t answer the ones I did. But it’s worth a shot:
Ouch. How can I find out if that’s the case, and anything I can do about it? I was really fond of the screenname, and everyone I’ve ever known uses that addy to e-mail me.
I don’t know if you can. M$ really doesn’t give a hoot about it’s paying customers let alone the ones that use the free service.