Locked out of Hotmail

For no apparent reason, my Hotmail password no longer works. I activated the reset option and found I had forgotten the exact answer to the secret question "Your First Car". Is there a way to contact a person by phone to help sort this out? This is a desperate situation as all my email contacts are located there. Steven Rodney

There's no way a free service with about 200 million users can afford to answer the phone. However, go to the Passport log-in screen (https://login. passport.net), click the option that says "Get answers from Customer Support", and then select "Contact us" to get a mail form. In section 2, it asks "What type of problem do you have?" Pick the drop-down option "I forgot my password", fill in the other details, and hope for the best.

Apart from that, you should never rely solely on a free service, or on any online service, to store important data. You should always have a back-up copy of any data you can't replace. Hotmail is particularly dangerous as it deletes all your mail if you forget to log in for more than 30 days. I'd suggest using Gmail or Yahoo, at least as a back-up. Otherwise switch to the Windows Live Mail beta, because mail is not deleted for 120 days.

Backchat: Michael Juffs says: "There is a free web-based email service that has no time limit for storing messages: the much overlooked Opera and its Operamail." The drawback is that it provides only 3MB of storage space, and the paid-for version only 25MB.