Is this a fking coincidence?

I just got this on my both my emails that are SL related, BUT my sons and husbands email didnt get one... wtf is going?

Dear REMOVED

To help protect you from junk e-mail (spam), we periodically ask customers to verify that a person, not an automated program, is using your MSN Hotmail account.

We need you to complete this verification. Your Hotmail account is temporarily unavailable until the verification is done

To verify that your account is not being used by an automated program, go to http://www.hotmail.com and sign in as usual. You'll see a picture that contains letters and numbers. Type those letters and numbers to complete the verification, and you can then use your MSN Hotmail account.

For more information about sign-in verification, click Help in the MSN Hotmail sign-in box, and read the topic Matching the picture.

Thank you for helping us to reduce junk e-mail!
Sincerely,
MSN Hotmail Staff


MSN respects your privacy. To learn more, read our privacy statement at http://privacy.msn.com.

Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

Sounds like bs I never got anything like that, was the embedded link actually to www.hotmail.com or to a different site? You can tell by right clicking and selecting copy link address and pasting it into notepad. I wouldn't click on it either way.

Yes it is a rl email...

Wha?

No the email sounds like spam (which is what I meant by bs), you can tell where the link is going to only from the origional email (as copying and pasting it into here only copys the text and not the link, this forum autolinks any link to what they say if you get what I mean)and by doing what I said before, but yeah don't go to it.

It's just a random thing Microsoft does with Hotmail accounts. I've had it happen maybe three times in the last year. Log into Hotmail through the web and you'll be presented with one of those "Type the garbled letters and numbers in to prove you're human" pages and then all will be well! I promise!

Supposedly this is done to protect account hijacking, and it will disrupt POP3 access to Hotmail (and perhaps MSN.com) accounts until the web page is "dealt" with...

Well this is great now I can't access my email

Can't access it from hotmail.com or from Outlook/Outlook Express?

fomr my msn browser thingie it says not allowed

Try opening a regular Internet Explorer window and manually typing in http://www.hotmail.com and you should then get a standard login with e-mail and password. After verifying that information it should present you with the page I described above (type in garbled crap). The MSN browser uses login information to the MSN site I believe which is why it wouldn't work.

Ooohh, did you have the same password with SL as you did with your email?

yes

I did it wont let me

Yikes!!!

usually the emails that arent spam will just tell you to go to the site rather than supply the addy with the email.

(but uh.. havent used hotmail in like 20 years so I couldnt be 100%)

If you normally use the MSN browser client, when you open Internet Explorer look for the Sign In/Sign Out button at the top of the page. If the "Sign Out" button is there click on it to make sure you get a fresh Passport login screen. Make sure the MSN client is closed before opening Internet Explorer.

I get a message that says email not allowed
then it says parental controls denied

I wonder if they got into your account and changed the settings... You should copy and paste the message here.

Last bit of advice I can offer before you need to call MSN support:

Reboot, then try logging into Hotmail from a browser, not the MSN client.

Clear the chache, reboot, try the same.

If this still doesn't work I believe Microsoft offers 24/7 phone support for MSN accounts, look for that support information rather than Hotmail's if you are a MSN subscriber, otherwise look for general Microsoft support. I would hope cache/reboot would clear anything up though! Good luck!

After I closed the MSN browser, and yes I am with MSN and they are my internet provider... I tried to get back into and it wont let me it says access denied, and it use to remember my password and log me in automatically... I am calling them now, thanks for the help... wish me luck...

This is crap Sens. Good luck *hugs*

In all the years (almost 10) that I have used hotmail, I have never recieved any kind of email from SM or hotmail that reqyured me to do anything like this.

on hold... this is fun, i am not sure how much longer I can stay awake..

I haven't on a number of my Hotmail accounts. I have had to do it on two, including the one tied to my Second Life account, both being more recent creations to cover my Xbox Live GamerTags. I don't know the criteria, I just had seen the same thing that happened to Sensual. To me the funny thing is these two accounts don't get much spam, while my oldest account which has never received the message is spammed mercilessly!

I have a msn.com email account from back when they had msn explorer version 7. Back then it allowed you to create hotmail accounts using the msn domain. Not sure if that still works. But boy does my inbox get spammed on a daily basis... I don't bother to use it anymore. :/ They don't send me these verifications though. It's probably a hotmail.com domain thing only.

Finally after speaking to someone at MSN, they informed me that 872 emails were sent out from one of my email accounts and 6,780 were sent out from the other in a 24hr time frame... I have no idea how or why or what was sent out and I have no idea if this is related to the SL hack... my emails have been restored and all my passwords, security questions and answers have been changed...