Online Email Programs Might Not Be Safe

In January 2011, Brian Turner wrote an article called: Hotmail accounts suffer lost emails and he wrote.

A number of Hotmail users are reporting that late on New Years Eve their emails and email folders appeared to have been deleted.

Instead, their Hotmail account simply contains a welcome message standard to new accounts. The problem is not specific to any particular country, and has caused a mass of complaints to be posted to the official Hotmail forums.

While Hotmail staff have tried to assure users that recently deleted emails can normally be recovered from Hotmail servers, so far there appears to have been no reported fix to the issue. Free email services are convenient and easy to use, but rarely offer any protections against lost data because of limited contractual liability.

It’s certainly not the first time some Hotmail users have suffered problems with the service – back in 2008 reports were posted of user email addresses not even being recognised. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft have any redundancy in the system to recover the lost data. However, rarely do such instances ever result in data being recovered.

The article can be viewed in full at here.

Many years ago hotmail and other web based email systems used to make you log in regularly or risk having your account shut down. Many users would either forget to log in and not log in regularly enough and would end up having their accounts closed down on them and losing all their files and email as a result. No matter how big the company, Hotmail and some others can be risky to use.

A better option where possible is to set up an email program on your computer, associate it with your email provider so your emails come straight to your machine and then to set up a remote online data backup to save the emails each day. In an emergency the automatic data backup software can be opened and emails can be easily restored.

If you are using Online email programs consider setting this up on your computer and putting in place automatic online backups.