Why is my Hotmail login not being remembered?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #91, I look at a case where a Hotmail login is not remembered.
It’s gotta be cookies.

]]>
<![CDATA[

Hotmail login not remembered

Hotmail, like many other sites, uses cookies to remember the fact that you’re logged in. So if, for whatever reason, you’ve clearing cookies – that could instantly explain this problem.

There are a couple of cases where people can be clearing cookies when they don’t necessarily realize it. One is if they’re running a cleanup utility like, perhaps, CCleaner.

If the utility is set to clear cookies by default, then after running CCleaner, it will end up requiring that you login to every site that you had previously remembered: be it Hotmail or Facebook or any of the others.

Virus protection software

The other possibility, of course, is that anti-malware software sometimes has a rather paranoid view of cookies in general. They can sometimes get over aggressive in terms of deleting cookies when they shouldn’t.

Then, as a result, it causes you to be effectively logged out from whatever site you had logged into because the site can’t remember that you’re logged in.

So it’s all about cookies.

Browser cache

The other thing that I would recommend you try is to actually clear your cookies, clear your browser cache in the browser itself. It sounds counter intuitive, but the issue is that sometimes the browser itself can get confused. It can kind of sort of lose track, not only of its cache but its cookies and other things as well.

One way to reset the browser’s notion of how its cookies are stored is to delete them all using the browser’s own “clear your cookies” option.

So, if it’s not obvious where cookies are getting deleted from, and it’s not something that you can easily circumvent – then try clearing the cookies in the browser, relogging into Hotmail and seeing if that then does not keep you logged in.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)