Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! Guide to Staying Safe on the Internet — FREE Edition as my thank you for subscribing!

Can I tell when my Hotmail account was created?

Question:

I want to know the year I signed in with my e-mail address:
****@hotmail.com.

I’m going to assume you mean what year you first signed in.
The history of other sign-ins, including the most recent, is to the
best of my knowledge not available.

However, the date you created your account may well be.

Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!

Here’s what I did to get mine:

After signing in to the full version of Windows Live Hotmail, click
on the Options link in the upper right of the
window:

“You should be able to follow these steps and
get similar information about your own account.”

Windows Live Hotmail Options link

That presents a drop-down list, at the bottom of which is the
More options… link. Click on that and you’ll be
taken to a page that includes, in part this:

Windows Live Hotmail More Options highlighting the View and Edit Personal Information link

Click on View and Edit Personal Information and
you’ll reach your destination:

Windows Live Hotmail personal information with Registered Since date

Here you can see I’ve had my account since 1999, not long after
Microsoft acquired Hotmail. (I blur my Hotmail address because it’s
most definitely not the way to contact me.)

You should be able to follow these steps and get similar information
about your own account.

One caveat: since your account may be used for multiple services
such as Hotmail, MSN Instant Messenger the date would be the date you
created the account, regardless of which service you first
used to create it. Thus, if you create the account to use MSN Instant
Messenger, and then a year later start using Hotmail with the same
address, the date shown would be the earlier of the two.

Do this

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.

I'll see you there!

10 comments on “Can I tell when my Hotmail account was created?”

  1. Leo’s directions are correct, if MSN is not having problems! I’m using Firefox and when I followed the directions I couldn’t get to the account info screen. So just to see I logged on to IE (which took so long it confirmed my Firefox preference once again), and there I got to the account info. Back to Firefox and this time it worked.

    Reply
  2. I just did this, and what’s weird was, while I distinctly remember having registered my present hotmail account by at least mid 2001, when I looked at the personal info page it said that I had only been registered since August 2004. The only reason I can think that it would say this would be because somewhere around that time frame I simply quit using hotmail for a long enough period of time that they disabled my account, and so whenever I tried to log in again and had to reactivate everything, they must’ve simply switched forward to that date as my official registration date.

    This is quite the disappointment though as now I have no way of knowing precisely when I started using that address.

    Reply
  3. The layout seems to have changed, is there still a way to find out this information?

    They sure have. Looks like all the information is now very much “outlook.com”-like in appearance. And, no, I cannot find this information any longer.

    Leo
    09-Oct-2012
    Reply
  4. This is correct, it used to be the registration date that you could always check. However, since they have changed the layout, this info is no longer visible.

    Reply

Leave a reply:

Before commenting please:

  • Read the article.
  • Comment on the article.
  • No personal information.
  • No spam.

Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam. All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication.

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read.