How do I reactivate an old email Account
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
Here's the question.
My Hotmail account was hacked into and even though I have access
to my account, I did not feel comfortable, so I permanently closed it down.
I'm still able to use the address as
a website login, so I know no one else has been assigned by username.
I would love to once again be able to use this email account.
Need to be clear, you may not be able to, and more importantly,
the fact that it is your login ID for some other third party service means nothing
about your ability to actually access that email account.
It may very well have been reassigned, you just wouldn't know about it.
Here's the thing, when other services like, say,
I'll just use Dropbox as my example, when they use an email address as
an Identifier, that's all it is, it's an Identifier, it's you.
They can send notices to that email address, but they don't know anything
about whether or not that email address is valid.
When you set up the account, of course, yeah, they send an email to that email
address and you click some confirmation link or you enter in a confirmation code,
and at that time they know that the email address is valid and yours and now is
associated with your, say, Dropbox account.
However, if you let that email address go
inactive or it gets hacked and it's no longer something you have access to,
that third party service Dropbox, in my example, they have no clue.
You would still log in using that email address and your password.
You would not get any notifications from Dropbox because they would send email
to that email address that you don't have access to anymore.
So don't infer from being able to use
that email address as a login ID that the email address itself is still functional.
It may or may not be, and you wouldn't find out until you needed it to be.
For example, if your Dropbox account
requested confirmation for something, you wouldn't be able to get it.
You could potentially lose access to the Dropbox account because you some
time ago lost access to your email account.
The trick here, the important takeaway
here, is that your email account is incredibly important.
Do not let it lapse for lack of activity.
Make sure that it's secure, and if you do lose access to it,
do your best to recover using the forgot password or whatever other account
recovery instructions are available to you.
That's really the only thing that can happen.
Now, if, for example, you've lost access to your email account
and you can't make the account recovery work, and especially if the service is one
of those services that will tell you that, hey, this account doesn't even exist.
You can try, I have to say, try creating that account again
with that same old email address as if it were a new account.
If it works, well, chances are slim.
But if it works, then none of your data will be there.
It's a new empty account, but you'll have that email address back.
If it doesn't work, then either somebody else has opened
that account because you let it go inactive or it's not your account anymore
for some other reason because perhaps it was hacked and you couldn't recover it.
So make sure to keep your email address, your email account secure so that it
doesn't cause you to lose other accounts that you may have used it at.
I hope that's helpful.
I hope that clarifies what might be going on here.
For comments, for updates,
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.