Hotmail. We're Through.

So here's the story: I opened a hotmail account my freshman year of college. I started phasing it out in February of this year, in favor of my new gmail account. I checked the hotmail account every few months or so, just to make sure there were no stray emails from people who hadn't gotten the message about the new email address. In that hotmail account, I had several old emails saved...sentimental notes, journal entries for classes, etc. Things I planned to someday either email to myself at my new address or copy into Word documents and save for posterity. I signed into my hotmail account to do this last night, only to discover that ALL OF MY EMAILS WERE GONE. ALL OF THEM. Every. Single. One.

I emailed customer support who informed me that, oh yeah, by the way, hotmail is now "windows live" or some crap, and if you don't log in every 60 days, your email gets deleted. WHAT?!?! Nobody ever informed me of this change. Nobody ever told me this. Suddenly, all of my email is just gone??? And apparently, according to a second customer service person, it is irrevocably so. Once email is deleted from your account, it is also deleted from their servers in order to make things run faster. WHAT?!?!? Makes me really appreciate gmail, running on Google's servers that somehow never run out of space. Makes me really pissed off that I never copied all of those old letters and college journal entries into documents.

I am closing my hotmail account for good. I don't understand how they can just delete your messages without warning, and then erase them immediately from their servers. What if someone goes out of town for 2 months and doesn't check email? Everything is just gone? Forever? They should at least wait a year or something before PERMANENTLY deleting everything.

I am so irritated right now, I know I am typing like a crazy person with all caps and !?!?!? and all that, but I don't care. UGH.

On the one hand, it's my own damn fault for not backing up sooner. On the other hand, what are they thinking, deleting MY emails so that the server will run faster for everyone else? I am trying to be zen about it, and tell myself that they're just emails, that they're not a big deal. But there was some seriously sentimental stuff in there...and from now on I am just going to create hard copies of EVERYTHING that is important to me. Guess you can't rely on technology.