It is my mother in laws. I have nothing important on my email. I back everything up.
And your mother-in-law should have been doing so as well. As should every single person who uses email.
The thing is very few people like her are savvy about this.
You cant hold Microsoft responsible for her lack of knowledge. That's a problem of education, not a justification to demand some form of redress for the inaccessibility of a service
she did not pay for.
If a service is offered they should provide a way to resolve issues that makes sense and is accessible.
They have literally zero obligation to do so, legally, monetarily, or even morally. If I give out free widgets, you can;t come and complain to me about your widget breaking. You can't come complain to me when I
stop handing out the free widgets, either. They're free - you have no
right to them, you are not
entitled.
So too with free email - Microsoft
has to do jack and shit. Their concern right now is the possible loss of customers in your mother-in-law's position, which likely doesn't concern them overly much.
If my Yahoo account disappears tomorrow, I'll be severely annoyed as I'll have to do a lot of updating to get everything sent elsewhere, but Yahoo won't
owe me any form of customer service or other form of redress if they do so. After all, since I don't pay anything, I'm not technically a
customer at all. Same with your M-I-L and Microsoft.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995.
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