Hotmail not receiving emails

[mobeans]

Hi,

My hotmail account has not received all the emails that need to be received in the past week and a half. I receive some emails but not all. I use this email account for college and it's very important that I receive their emails especially with school right around the corner. Please help me resolve this issue.

Thank you.

 

[EQ Admin]

Hi @mobeans,

In general, you should be cautious of using a free email account for email that matters. There is generally limited support for free email accounts. What happens if your Hotmail account gets hacked and you lose access to your email and/or it's used to reset passwords and compromise other accounts associated with your Hotmail address?

There isn't much you can do besides adding senders such as SallieMae (and other loan providers) and college email addresses to your contacts and whitelist to try and fix the problem. Did you check your spam folder?

To try and fix the problem going forward, I recommend buying your own domain name that you could use for the rest of your life, such as "firstNamelastName.com", and associate that domain with a cheap email service such as your registrar who probably offers free email hosting and support with the domain name purchase. The cost of a domain name that has free email hosting is usually at most $10/year after the first year.

If that isn't something you want to do you could try another email service such as Gmail.

 

[mobeans]

Yes, that is why I'm switching to a gmail or yahoo account.

But yes, I have checked my spam/junk folder and there's nothing there. Is there any way I can locate those unreceived emails? Where do I look? I haven't change my settings or anything. I've deleted emails to give way for storage purposes.

Also, thank you for the other info.

 

[EQ Admin]

If the missing email is not in your spam folder, or accidentally delivered to a folder because of a message rule, the only way to find out what happened is to have the support for the senders check their outgoing mail logs. At a minimum they'll be able to say if the email bounced with a specific error message or they can confirm that Microsoft accepted it and disappeared within their systems.

 

[mobeans]

I have asked my senders if the emails were accepted/sent properly. They've confirmed and said yes, the emails were sent with no error. So what now? Is there no hope in locating these emails?

 

[EQ Admin]

Did the senders really check? Depending what was doing the sending (a person vs. a system) a person might have "Sent" but didn't get a bounce back, or a system might say it tried to send but doesn't really know what happened after that. Checking the email logs on the outgoing smtp relays for those senders is the only way to know what happened. You can challenge their answer by asking for a copy of the mail logs that show the delivery was accepted by Microsoft mail servers. It will contain the exact date, time, and other specifics about the email.

Are you missing any other email? Sometimes missing email is a sign that you account is hacked. You can try changing your password and turning on 2 step authentication if that's not done already, but that doesn't seem like it's the problem here.

Back to my original thought, after the challenge, if they really do have mail logs showing the delivery, they can open a ticket with Microsoft asking what happened to the email.

 

[mobeans]

Ok will try doing that. It might be difficult because they are emails from my institution and school programs I am affiliated with. But I will try.

And yes, I have been missing some emails that from friends and colleagues. I shall change my password then just to be on the safe side. Hopefully my account isn't hacked.