When you explicitly close your Hotmail account (note: only Windows Live Hotmail accounts can be closed by their owners), you actually only close the email service of that account!
Your Windows Live ID (the thing you use to sign in into Messenger) will still be available for another
365 days.
If there is no activity detected on that account during these 365 days, the Windows Live ID will be permanently removed and made available again for others to create.
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The
270 days you speak of is the 'countdown' for when an account becomes 'inactive' (not removed) by itself. If you leave a Windows Live ID account for what it is and it hasn't had any activity during 270 days (or 10 days for just new created accounts), it will automatically get the 'inactive' status. Aka: you don't need to do anything for this. So, if you don't want your account to become 'inactive' you need to log in at least once every 270 days.
If the account stays another
90 days inactive after these 270 days of inactivity, then the account will be completely removed and the name will be made available again for other people.
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see:
http://windowslivehelp.com/solution.aspx?solution...-ae2c-91e158a4cc76
http://windowslivehelp.com/solution.aspx?solution...-a60c-aae81982a54e
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Thus:
quote:
Originally posted by euq3
however during this time that my msn account was in the process of being deactivated( the 3-4 days that I haven't logged in) could they have still added me on msn Messenger or would the messenger say that the account did not exist?
There is no "
process of being deactivated". It happens instantly after x days of inactivity (see above). Thus, before the account gets the status 'inactive', it is 'active', just like it always is, there is not something in between.
So, since you logged in again into Messenger, etc, nothing would have happened. Neither you or your contacts would have noticed anything different.
So, yes, they can still add you in Messenger.
However! If you explicitly closed your Hotmail account, the email service connected to it would have been removed though. So, if your contacts would have send you an email, the email would have bounced back to them...
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Also note that simply changing your password (and secret question) might have done the trick to remove those 'virusses' and spam send from your account though!
This is because such 'virusses' are 99% of the time spambots which got your credentials (login and pwd) by social engineering. Aka: at one point you fell for a phising scam. Eg: entering your login and password on a site to check who has blocked you. Such stuff is impossible to see, and all such sites do is collecting people's credentials in order to sell them to spammers.
Thus, changing your credentials will easily stop this (provided you aren't infected with a keylogger or other form of local virus).
Remember: never ever give out your password on non-microsoft related sites. If the site is legit and it needs your Windows Live ID and password, it would _always_ go to a Microsoft page for that to let you log in. It never ever will present you a form on the site itself where you can login.
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