I never thought I’d say this, but I’m pleasantly pleased with Microsoft, particularly their Hotmail division (I know, “pleased” and “hotmail” in the same sentence — go figure).
I have a couple of Hotmail accounts. One that I use for spam that comes from search engine submissions and the other for my MSN Messenger account in Trillian. Otherwise, I don’t really use them much. I log into them both weekly to make sure that the accounts stay active so they’ll work in Trillian, however.
Yesterday (Wednesday), I made the attempt to log into the latter of those two accounts, and couldn’t, it was giving me a password error. I know I never changed the password, but OK, whatever, so I went to get their password reminder screen, and it gave me my password reminder question as follows:
@####$$%%#$%546””””””””45^6’456#%^^$&@$&$@&$%^$%^$%g554
Yes, that was it. That was obviously not the question I set up originally. Not hoping for much, I e-mail their support department. I wasn’t really miffed about losing the account, but I was miffed that somebody out there might be pretending to be me (as the account had my name in it, so it’s obviously my account), and also because I had a bunch of people on my MSN Messenger list in Trillian that I didn’t want to lose.
Surprisingly, I got an e-mail from Hotmail the very next morning. I was stunned. I didn’t expect to hear anything from them, if at all, for at least a week or two considering the horror stories that I had read about on Google. After drilling through their 11 questions that they asked to verify my identity, e-mailed back, they reset the account, and I was good to go.
So I am happy to say that my Hotmail account works fine again, I’ve changed my password to something horribly complicated, and everything is good to go. Kudos to Microsoft.
