Hi, I am having problems with my hotmail/outlook.com email account. It appears that my hotmail was upgraded to an outlook.com account sometime over the past couple months and now all of my historical emails dating back to 1996 are missing. I have had, and have actively used, this account since 1996 and had around 800 emails that I wished to keep for various reasons (important personal emails, photos, confirmations, Product license codes, among other things).

To be clear, I did not accidentally delete any messages... my account was not 'hacked'... and I did not change any settings on my hotmail account. My account has never been inactive for x number of days… I have uses it daily since the 90’s.  I had all my emails safe and sound one day when I went to bed... and when I woke up the next morning, they were all gone and I had a shiny new (empty) outlook.com inbox.

To further complicate this experience, I first submitted my issue the customer support chat service on July 5th. They promptly told me that they couldn’t help me and that I had to call the customer service line for my issue (1-800-936-5700). I called that number on July 19th and was told that they couldn’t support my account and that I had to contact the customer support online chat (which I already had previously contracted). I explained this and was told that the phone line couldn’t help me and that the chat line just needed me to call to get a case number... to use the next time I contacted the online chat support (total BS). So immediately after hanging up I get back on the chat line, provide the case number, and was told that the chat line can’t do anything with the case number and that I had to post my issue and case number on this forum to have it escalated by a windows live support rep.

Let me be clear... I just want my email to work as expected. I don’t want to turn this email support issue into a big case of sour grapes, but I just need a clear escalation path to resolve this issue without being run in circles. The previous troubleshooting steps of turning off conversation threading, reading pane, and checking/restoring deleted emails are not applicable. Please advise.

Thanks-
Dominic Mazzotta (case number: 1211648602)