You know the drill, enter your account email address and the letters represented by the captcha to prove you’re human, not a robot. Or thought I did, but it turns out that, well, the password I entered was incorrect:Īfter trying a number of possibilities, I cried “uncle!” and clicked on the “Can’t access your account?” link, which took me to one of those accursed captcha things: Here’s how I fixed things…įirst off, I logged in to my Microsoft account. When I was recently writing about SkyDrive I had the same issue, actually, that I couldn’t remember my account password. Thing is, Microsoft keeps track of all your old passwords (presumably in an encrypted manner, so they’re not all just sitting on a server somewhere in the clear, waiting to have some enterprising hacker extract everything!). But that’s tedious and it can be annoying to have multiple accounts and not know what’s what.Īs with every other service, however, Microsoft has a password recovery program, though it’s really a “verify your identity and we’ll let you reset your password to something new” if you really want to be honest about it.
However you slice it, really the easiest way to deal with a lost password is to simply set up a new account and start over. You’re right about your Microsoft Account being based on previous accounts you might have set up with different Microsoft properties, notably either Windows Live Messenger or Hotmail (now called, of course).
