Why You Should Be Logging Into Your Many E-mail Accounts Once In A While
Can you say ‘OOPS’ ?
Messages and other content were irreversibly deleted from in-boxes and archive folders of 14,000 accounts the other day during routine cleanup tasks by the Admins of Charter Communications.
It appears that part of their cleanup work is to simply delete any e-mail from accounts that haven’t been used in 3 months, all this with no warning. They immediately realized they made a mistake of not archiving it off first but it was too late, the information was irretrievably lost.
In place of the lost data, Charter is applying a $50 credit to accounts suffering from their gaffe.
Well, $50 is a lot of money but let’s hope that a job offer wasn’t in that in-box or perhaps some other vital document or family photos.
The lesson learned here is to periodically log into the account, or generate some other activity. I do this for a variety of Yahoo and Hotmail accounts that I rarely used, when I forget I’ll realize my mistake when I learn that the account needs to be reactivated.
In fact, one highly desirable Hotmail account I have today was obtained by trying to create a new account every week and when asked for the name I wanted to use I entered this same name, every time, hoping. Of course since the account was in-use, the registration wizard would prompt me to use a variant and I’d quit until the next week. That is until after about 6 months later after many dozens of tries, one day it worked!
Apparently the previous owner of the account lapsed in their requirements to periodically use the thing, so Hotmail deactivated it and put it back in the pool of available names. Hooray for obsessive compulsive disorder! 
