How do I transfer information such as contacts and mail from one Windows Live Hotmail account to another?

I’m actually not surprised that you can’t find the information. To the best
of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist.

You’re running into at least two limitations. I’ll look at them both, and
give you my (rather bleak) outlook on what you might be able to do or not
do.

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To the best of my knowledge there’s no automated way to transfer emails or contacts from one Hotmail account to another.

What many people like you are looking for simply doesn’t exist.

While there may be a workaround for many folks, for some information, you’ve got bigger problems.

Limitation One: Logging In

In order to get anything out of an account you need to be able to login to that account. There are no workarounds for this. If you can’t access the account – which seems to be where this started for you – you can’t get at the data that’s associated with the account. Period.

You might try contacting Windows Live Hotmail customer support to help you regain access to the account, but I have to be honest and say that the success rate is very low from what I hear. It’s worth a shot, but mostly because it’s the only shot.

Without access to the original account containing the information you want to recover, you’re done. You can’t even get to a point where the next limitation kicks in.

Limitation Two: Copying Data

Let’s say you were able to somehow regain access to the first account, but you still wanted to copy the data out of it. It comes down to this:

• Email: you can’t. Sure, you could forward each message individually from one account to another, but that’s not what most people are looking for. What would be most helpful is a way to bulk-move email from one account to another. Doesn’t exist.

• Contacts: You can’t bulk transfer, but Hotmail does allow you to “export” and “import” contact lists. Click on the Options menu (upper right in Hotmail’s window), then More Options. On the resulting page you’ll see options near the bottom to Export contacts and Import contacts. Export from the one account and import into the other.

It’s a bit of a hassle, but it should work.

No Limitations

The issue at hand is that the information you want is kept by someone else, namely Windows Live Hotmail. If you lose access to your account you can’t get it, and you’re further restricted by the functionality that they choose to implement or not implement – like bulk moving email between accounts.

The approach that many people use is not to use the web interface at all, but rather use a desktop email program like Windows Live Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. By using these programs, your contact list and your email is maintained on your own computer. You have control. If you create a new account all of your email and all of your contacts remain available to you regardless of which account you choose to use within the program. If you lose access to the account you’ve still got all your information stored safely on your PC.

The drawback, of course, is that you need to be at your PC to see that email. (And of course you take responsibility for backing up your email – but you already back up your machine, right?)

But sadly for your specific situation I have no direct solution. Everything hinges on having access to that original email account.