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Summary: Web based email services like Hotmail keep your mail on their servers. But your browser might be caching the email you read on your hard disk. If you have a Hotmail account and you check your mail at your office, does the email go to the hard drive and how long will it stay there. Is it easy to retrieve and is it completely readable? Say an email from a year ago on a heavily used computer. Yes and no. Hotmail, like many other email services, is web-based. That means that all of your information, including your email, is kept on Hotmail's servers. However, you do have to use a web browser, such as Internet Explorer or FireFox, to read your mail. That's when things get complicated. • By keeping all of your mail on its servers, web-based email services allow you to view your email from just about anywhere you can find a PC. Fire up a browser, login, and you've got your email. So in that sense, no, Hotmail and other web-based services do not download your email to your computer. In fact, that's one of the reasons I so strongly recommend avoiding these services for anything truly important, since you're at their mercy. You have no way of even backing up your email yourself. If the service fails, your email is lost or your account is stolen, you have no way to get it back. "When you view your email on a web based email service,
you're just viewing a web page like any other."
However, its important to know that some of your email may be present, in a different form, on the computer you read it on in your browser's cache. Web browsers like Internet Explorer work by copying pages from the web sites you visit down to your machine, and then displaying them. When you view your email on a web based email service, you're just viewing a web page like any other. That means it can be cached. That also means that anyone who comes along after you could, potentially, look in your browser's cache and see the email you recently viewed. Viewing the contents of your browser's cache isn't very intuitive, but it can be done:
Files remain in the cache for different amounts of time depending on how big the cache is, and how heavily the browser is used. It could be a few days, or it could be months. If you're concerned about privacy, and you're trying to make sure there are no copies of your email left around, then you need to make sure to clear the browser cache when you're done. To do so:
On the other hand, if you're looking for a piece of email that you recently viewed in your web based email, then rather than clearing the cache, you'll want to browse it instead, using the instructions earlier. This can get complicated, as the URLs for viewing mail aren't always simple or obvious. Pay particular attention to the base domain listed (i.e. something.something.hotmail.com or perhaps something.something.hotmail.msn.com), and the type of file being accessed (often ".htm", though Hotmail uses something called /cgi-bin/getmsg with a long string after it). It may take some work, and to be honest what you're looking for may not be there - it may already have been cleared out of the cache. But depending on your situation, it may be worth the effort. Just remember that the more you use your internet browser, the more things will be "pushed out" of the cache to make room for the new pages you're visiting. Related:
Article 10914 | Posted November 15, 2006 |
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my name dosent whant to go in
Posted by: belgica at March 22, 2007 12:50 PMl can not use my msn messenger and cannot get my messenges from my hotmail
Posted by: Jamie at May 23, 2007 9:22 AMwell i have a question...if someone got into your e-mail account and sent messages or deleted messages....is there a way to find out what they sent or deleted,even after theyve deleted it out of the trash bin
Posted by: chris at June 24, 2007 2:32 PMI have been trying to read letters in my inbox and can't get anything to come up.What can I do?
Posted by: walter-Opal Murphy at December 2, 2007 1:09 PMhow can i get connected back to my hotmail.
Posted by: Dessie Gibson at January 30, 2008 8:14 AMDear Leo,
Im trying to locate an email in hotmail received many months ago. Please advise "how to" relocate it in order I can resave it elsewhere.
Many Thanks
Kind regards,
Sam
Posted by: sam at February 8, 2008 11:24 AMCant get into either my hotmail or messenger just goes blank nothing just a clear screen
Posted by: Edward J Reinholz at February 11, 2008 5:52 PMI am unable to locate my old hotmail, and I have a lotof important stuff, including my resume, that I just updated, any suggestions how I can retrive this info?
Posted by: Jay at June 12, 2008 6:29 PMwhy cant i get connected to my yahoo mail and my emails (hotmail)
Posted by: julie wade at July 3, 2008 12:44 PMI thought I had registered an email account. Now when I send a message to it, it comes back undelivered. How can I tell if I registered this account or not?
Posted by: Barbara at September 14, 2008 2:17 PM