Recover an inactive account

Dfess · Nov 3, 2022

I'm trying to recover an gamertag that has been inactive for 6-8 years, Chessmess17, that I know was set up with this email address because there are still old subscription emails mentioning the gamertag. However, when I tried to log in, I was prompted to choose a new gamertag. Is there any way to find out what happened to it? Could it have been moved to another email address or deleted?

:)

XBF Mohammed C

Hello Cristobal,

I am afraid the account cannot be recovered since after 365 days of inactivity, your email will be deleted and cannot be recovered, and after 2 years of inactivity, your Microsoft account will be deleted and cannot be recovered.

JosefLBohorquez

Hi and thanks for reaching Microsoft Xbox gamer's community. My name is Josef.
I'm an Independent Advisor and a Microsoft Xbox user like you.

Hope you're doing great today despite this Dfess

I found this strange, usually the system deletes automatically an inactive account after 5 years.

But if the account exists until today, I can advise you to fill the account recovery form, in that way you're going to submit a ticket with Microsoft account recovery team https://account.live.com/acsr

You can try all the emails you remember or if you had a phone number attached to the account, you can use that too.

Sadly, an account cannot be recovered with the gamertag alone.

Also, you could try alternative methods to recover your account here:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-bil...

Please note that regular no one here including Microsoft Support is capable to send password reset links for security policies

Ellarianora

I dont think you would be able to claim it back. Microsoft deleted inactive account that were inactive for 2 years or something so I'd doubt you could recover it. Sorry about that.

Jesse E'

Hello, My name is Jesse. I'm an Independent Advisor and a member of the Microsoft community and I'd love to assist you today.

To keep your Outlook.com account active you must sign in to the account at least once every 365 days. After 365 days of inactivity, your email will be deleted and cannot be recovered. After 2 years of inactivity, your Microsoft account will be deleted and cannot be recovered.

HassanB

Unfortunately you won't be able to recover the account if the e-mail address went inactive. If the account was still on your XBOX 360 and you hadn't tried to recover it already then you would have been able to login to it and been able to change it that
way. Unfortunately they haven't quite figured out a way to bring back inactive Windows Live ID's yet, and your data has been lost. There's really no easy to say it but you are unfortunately out of luck.

Recover an inactive account