got no mail at hotmail

I have five personal email accounts that I check regularly. Why I need five is irrelevant (meaning I have no good reason). Needless to say some do not get checked as regularly as others. I did think I checked the lesser used ones at least once every one or two weeks, though.

One of the accounts that I check infrequently is a Hotmail account I got when I was a freshman in college (1997). I have only kept it because there are a few select people (I am not sure who all is on the list) who can only contact me in this way because I haven't talked to them since setting up the four other accounts. I've been meaning to clear this up, but it hasn't been a priority.

A few days ago I decided to log into the account to see if I had gotten anything important in the past couple of weeks. To my shock when I went to log in it prompted me that I was creating a new email account and dumped me to an inbox with a single "Welcome to Hotmail" message within. Aaugh! My account had been removed and I had just inadvertently recreated it. I didn't have much in the account, but what was there cannot be retrieved elsewhere. I had emails from as far back as 1998 that had vanished in a poof of logic.

I had been delaying moving completely over to my GMail account, and I think this provided the motivation to do that. Now to figure out who those four or five people are who only know about my Hotmail account.