Microsoft Accounts

[Thisonepotato]

hi all I am in a bit of a confusion with my microsoft accounts if anyone can help.

I have an old account, it is linked to my xbox gamertag and uses email 1 which is a personal domain address and it appears this is what is used to sign in on my PC.

I do not use email 1 or that microsoft account for anything else. I use email 2 day to day which is an outlook email address and I have one drive, Office 365 etc on this Microsoft account.

I am guessing I cannot merge these accounts or move my gamer tag to the email 2 account?

If not, I am going to close my email 1 account and lose the gamer tag history but what does that mean for signing into my PC do I need to create a new sign in with the email 2 microsoft account? I dont have much on my PC apart from Steam downloads. Everything else is in the cloud.

Thanks for any help. For some reason this is really puzzling me.

[ARFBY]

Hi, Not an expert but did have a quick look for you.

https://support.xbox.com/en-SG/help/Account-Profil...

This page gives the answer to a similar question. a few replies are by an Xbox Ambassador.

[mmm-five]

Why not just change your Xbox/Windows account email addresses to email2?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billin...

[Thisonepotato]

trying to add email 2 to email 1 account says email in use. Which it is as I have two Microsoft accounts. I have found a way around this by setting up temporary emails to add as primary and then remove email 2 and add that to email 1 account.

I am wondering if my office 365 subs will move across. Are they attached to the email or the account?

[Robotron70]

Keep it all separate, my OneDrive account got locked and because my Xbox account used the same email I lost a 20 year Xbox account which included my gamertag, gamerscore and all my digital purchases. fking thieves they are..

[Thisonepotato]

Thanks all so I had set up two dummy accounts on my domain so temp and temp1 to act as the primary in each Microsoft account and then I removed email 1 and email 2 and tried to add these to the account I wanted to retain. Nope wouldn't let me, strangely or not and i don't really understand this but my outlook email email 2 was not working whilst this was happening, emails being sent to it were bounced back, luckily managed to get back to the original set up.

Separate it is. Thanks for the help.

[Brother D]

Sorry for thread hijack, but what happened with that guy who had all his microsoft account switched off and lost all access to years of docs and photos? Did he ever get access back? (I've made sure I have multiple off-line backups since hearing about that incidence)...

[Robotron70]

Brother D said:

Sorry for thread hijack, but what happened with that guy who had all his microsoft account switched off and lost all access to years of docs and photos? Did he ever get access back? (I've made sure I have multiple off-line backups since hearing about that incidence)...

That’s me, so to briefly update, MS refused to reopen the account ‘due to a serious violation of their MSA’, but wouldn’t tell me what part I had broken. I tried to go via the ICO and ask for a SAR, no dice because the data is stored in Ireland and so another organisation called the Data Protection Commission manage data over there and were utterly hopeless and got me nowhere.

I also contacted Microsoft’s UK DPO, who eventually replied and refused to help ‘due to the rights and freedoms of others’.

And finally I got an email out of the blue asking me to arrange a call between a Microsoft rep, a Microsoft legal advisor my legal advisor and myself. Their legal rep refused to answer any questions I had prior to this appointment, they would only communicate in the telephone call.

My solicitor wouldn’t have a clue on this subject and wouldn’t know who to even refer me to, plus I don’t have the money to take on the likes MS so I was bullied into giving up my appeal.

All this and I still don’t know what I was supposed to be guilty of?! I suspect their PhotoDNA software found a few pictures of my kids in the bath, but it’s only a hunch. Everything else in my account is 100% legal, no dodgy software, inflammatory material, hate speech and nothing at all distributed, illegal or otherwise.

Don’t rely on cloud backup, especially anything to do with Microsoft as there is no robust appeals process for false positives.

20 years of accounts/data/money gone without any chance of recourse.

[Brother D]

Robotron70 said:

Brother D said:

Sorry for thread hijack, but what happened with that guy who had all his microsoft account switched off and lost all access to years of docs and photos? Did he ever get access back? (I've made sure I have multiple off-line backups since hearing about that incidence)...

That’s me, so to briefly update, MS refused to reopen the account ‘due to a serious violation of their MSA’, but wouldn’t tell me what part I had broken. I tried to go via the ICO and ask for a SAR, no dice because the data is stored in Ireland and so another organisation called the Data Protection Commission manage data over there and were utterly hopeless and got me nowhere.

I also contacted Microsoft’s UK DPO, who eventually replied and refused to help ‘due to the rights and freedoms of others’.

And finally I got an email out of the blue asking me to arrange a call between a Microsoft rep, a Microsoft legal advisor my legal advisor and myself. Their legal rep refused to answer any questions I had prior to this appointment, they would only communicate in the telephone call.

My solicitor wouldn’t have a clue on this subject and wouldn’t know who to even refer me to, plus I don’t have the money to take on the likes MS so I was bullied into giving up my appeal.

All this and I still don’t know what I was supposed to be guilty of?! I suspect their PhotoDNA software found a few pictures of my kids in the bath, but it’s only a hunch. Everything else in my account is 100% legal, no dodgy software, inflammatory material, hate speech and nothing at all distributed, illegal or otherwise.

Don’t rely on cloud backup, especially anything to do with Microsoft as there is no robust appeals process for false positives.

20 years of accounts/data/money gone without any chance of recourse.

Appreciate the update and sorry to hear that - It would be pretty disasterous for most people, and I can imagine 99.999% of people would never think that google/MS can just (at any point) turn around and say "sorry you're never seeing your data again, and there's nothing you can do about it".

It's wild that even after you've gone down the legal route, someone from MS hasn't looked into it further and said 'so this is clearly this is a false positive and not an international criminal we are dealing with - just we should restore access'.

[Robotron70]

If I was truly up to no good then I’d simply encrypt my data and then upload, or if they feel that strongly about what I’m supposed to have done then tip off the police etc.

Also, I was able to open a new account after a few days using exactly the same details such as name, address, bank account etc. As much as it pained me to give them anymore money we do all use the 365 Office apps.

I’ve seen others with the same account lock, but it’s usually people who turn on 2FA and then change phones/numbers/emails and then can’t authenticate, Xbox hackers or who give their passwords to scammers. <—- I’m none of those.

I did have alternate backups on Dropbox and iCloud, but lost all my 20 year Xbox account content and lots of documents that I’d scanned from paper. I was also about 9 months into an online course which I paid £1000 and lost all my course notes which was really frustrating and things like my Microsoft Family were locked too, so my wife and kids lost their Outlook email addresses and account access.