Husband has a Droid phone. He also has a 10 or so year old Hotmail account that he’s forgotten the password for because he’s always accessing it from his Droid phone and he stored the password in there. :smack:
He uses this account as his “spambox” so he doesn’t have any folders or contacts or recent emails to use to get the account info verified - we’ve tried. He also never set up, or didn’t remember if he had any security questions, and none of his “usual passwords” (don’t get me started) are working. :smack:
There isn’t any unusual activity, and he can still check the account and send mail from it using his Droid, he just wants to remember the password so he can update it and all the other stuff and have access to the account.
So, intelligent and technological Dopers, is there a way to tell his phone to show us the password for his account, or is he just screwed?
Or, failing that, if someone’s google-fu is up to it, is there a phone service line for Hotmail/Live accounts? We can find phone tech support for Microsoft hardware and their resident in-box software, but no such luck for the Live accounts. If he can talk to a real person, he may be able to show off the email stuff and “prove” that he’s really the email account owner.
The “Forgot Password” selection takes you to a form where you have to fill out all of the account info that you created originally with the account (please note this was 10 years ago) such as the names that you gave, contact information, security questions, previous passwords, personalized folder names, email addresses of people that you’ve contacted recently and all that. Once all of that is filled in, they’ll check it against the account, and if you pass their automatic computer filter thingie, they’ll send you a PIN to a different email account so you can log in and update everything.
That isn’t helpful, because he remembers nothing for the form because it was ass ago that he created the account, and he doesn’t even know if he told the truth when they asked all those nosey questions in the first place, and he doesn’t have any personalized folders or recent contacts because he uses it as a spam dump.
So we tried to use the email addresses that sent him emails, and some of the emails that he sent long ago, but it wasn’t enough for them to “verify” and they want us to try again and put more info on the form - but we don’t have any more.
I’m 99% sure the following will be gibberish and of no help to you.
I don’t supposed the phone is rooted by any chance is it? If you or he doesn’t recognize the term, it isn’t. I bet it’s stored in the database at /data/data/com.android.email/databases/EmailProvider.db in either the Account or HostAuth table, but only root can view those files, so unless the phone is rooted, I can’t think of a way to get the info from the phone.
The only other thing I can think of is to run a sniffer on your home network while the phone is attached and checking the mail, then look at the sniffer output for a password. Unless either of you are somewhat geeky, this will probably either sound like gibberish or the output from a sniffer would look like gibberish.
You can have google back up email settings to their server so if you change phones, it can be restored automatically. I don’t think the passwords can be accessed by you though, but if he were to change phones, hotmail would probably still work.
Sorry, I’m sure that’s no help but maybe it will inspire someone else to have an idea about how to get it.
If it’s any consolation, I had to abandon a Hotmail account for the same sort of reason.
Fubaya’s post could very well hold the solution, but if you’re not technically inclined it could be a long road to get the phone rooted or get a packet sniffer working.