email validity period - or - how long does Hotmail keep emails for before deleting them?

[Chesnokov]

I am using this hotmail account from last 5 to 6 years and now i am in search of history. Actually i am searching for a mail which i have received some about 4 years back. But the problem is that even after going this back in my inbox, I am not able to find out those mails. I would like to ask you guys that does anybody know that for how much time hotmail keeps one mail in an account. I mean is there any kind of validity period on emails?

[Techno01]

Windows Live Hotmail stores an emails in free account if it remains active and then it puts those emails in an inactive state once the mail have not been opened within 120 days. Accounts with active subscriptions, such as Windows Live Hotmail Plus, are exempted from the account expiration policy. I think you should check that you are using the paid account or a free one.

[deveritt]

Actually it depends on the time when you have visited that particular mail last time. I guess there would be some time up to which an emails are there in Inbox then they are moved away. I am not so sure about it but i guess it should be working like that. One more thing which you can do is that you should recheck in all the folders of your account as it might happen that they have moved to some other folder as you have not visited them from long time.

[johnson22]

According to me, Emails or documents or whatever you have on your Email Account are saved in one space and you must be knowing that you have got a limited space to use on that particular account. So i think it would be depending on the space which you have used for saving mails on your account. One that space has been used up to its full limit then it might be removing an oldest mails from an account in order to create a space for new mails.

[Jackson2]

Suppose the mail which you are searching for have got deleted then there wont be any way to retrieve those mails back to your inbox. Actually hotmail team says that the email has been deleted recently then it is possible to get those mails back but not for sure and if it has been many days that the mail has been deleted then it is not possible to retrieve them.

[Trio]

I have seen the similar kind of problem with my Hotmail account which i am using from 1997. Actually when i check an oldest mails on my account then i found that there mails up to only 2003 and older then that have gone somewhere. I do not know that where they would be as it does not seems to be any important mails before this much years, I have never bothered about it. But i guess it is an issue if there would be any important mails.

[Techguru01]

It depends on the type of account which you are using on Hotmail as free accounts does not have much features as compare to the paid one as even if you have deleted the mails from the paid account, still there is possibility that you can get those mails back with the help of Hotmail care team. And there is a validity period of an account so it is nothing special validity for the mails.