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My inbox is disappearing every day.

Martin Noel 0 Reputation points
2026-04-01T14:51:45.5233333+00:00

My 18+ years of inbox have disappeared from my Outlook. Upon noticing that, I came to find out that my account was successfully logged into by bot hackers 100+ times in a 10 day span, from different countries around the world. No alert, no logout, I wouldn't have known if not for looking through security options.

I do not have any Rules in place, any Retention Policies in place, or any Auto-Deleting Auto-Archiving in place that I am aware of. Emails came through the same day I found all of this out, and they remained. However, the following day, they had disappeared again and I only have today's new emails in my inbox.

Microsoft Live Chat does not have any answers or any help available to me. They can only try and direct me to an Outlook Chat Agent through a 5 step breakdown, which ultimately leads me to Community Help only, not chat support. So here I am.

Outlook | Web | Outlook.com | Email
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  1. Chloe-V 7,345 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2026-04-02T08:18:19.8233333+00:00

    Hi Martin Noel,

    Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum. 

    To narrow this down, could you please confirm:

    • Where are you seeing the “only today’s emails” inbox — Outlook.com in a browser, the Outlook desktop app (new/classic), or the Outlook mobile app?
    • When the older emails “disappear,” are they showing in Deleted Items (including Recover items deleted from this folder) or Junk Email?
    • In Outlook.com settings, do you see any Mail Rules (especially move/delete/forward/redirect), even if you didn’t create them?

    If your account showed unfamiliar successful sign-ins, Microsoft’s “compromised account” steps are also here: How to recover a hacked or compromised Microsoft account.

    Once I have the answers above, I can point you to the right next steps for your exact setup.


    Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread. 


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