Cancelling your Passport.NET Account?

An anonymous reader asks: "i read on the Passport.NET site that 'Microsoft has announced plans to discontinue the .NET Passport express purchase service' AKA .NET Passport wallet. This may well be old news but the reason i stumbled on it is I want to discontinue my Passport account. There is a link on the account maintainace page that allows just this - however it bounced me to my Hotmail account which I had to close first. However my Passport account is still open and when I try to close it I just get bounced to the Hotmail reactivation page... (the reason i am so hyper about this is anger at being automatically opted-ini to two seperate information sharing schemes without being asked - no wonder there was so much spam! Have any of you had a similar problem closing your account? Has anyone managed? If so how?"

Comments

Open another email

[TheSHAD0W]

I think what may be going on is your Passport account is tied to that email account, and is trying to send a cancellation confirmation or something.

Try reactivating the old email account, and also make a new temporary account, say with Yahoo email. Then change the Passport email to the Yahoo account. THEN you ought to be able to shut down both Passport and that MS email account.

My Useless Domain Name

[MBCook]

Years ago I got a domain name and I used it for a long time. Well all of a sudden one day the hosting company that I'd be using for years disappeared off the 'net and I needed to find a new host. Well I found one, but I had to get a new domain name. Why?

• I no longer have the e-mail address I used when I got the origional domain name, and I can't get it back.
• But to change anything on the domain name, I have to have that e-mail address or...
• A password that was chosen by my hosting company (who's gone forever) and which I don't know. So the only option left is to...
• Fax a form to the InterNIC or whatever name they're under today with proof that I'm the owner of the domain name in question. I fax them a form with drivers liscenses that prove I lived at the house the domain was registered to and my new address which is on file with another domain name. I did this, but it can take up to six months, so I'm left with two other options now...
• Pay the $200 EXTORTION fee to have my application "expidited" (read: not lost forever). If I don't do this then I get to wait 6 months for the paper work to go though. Have I mentioned that I sent that damn form in 2 years ago? The only other thing I can do is...
• Or I can get my hosting company to add the domain to my account and they'll take care of it all for me. Did I mention that this has some huge fee attached to it too?

So am I getting screwed here or what? I know it's not exactly the same thing, but god what a terrible system. So I will fittingly end with something from the Drew Carey show that seems to fit things:

Drew: Well that's it. The great circle of crap is complete.

Passport and Hotmail

[kruetz]

Your hotmail account IS a passport account, so that to close your passport account, you must close your hotmail account. As it says at hotmail:

New to Hotmail?
Sign Up for a Free E-Mail Account!
and get a Microsoft® .NET Passport!

I don't like it, but it does kinda make sense from MS's PoV. I mean, if you've got Passport, why the hell would you have a completely separate user system for Hotmail?

But I find that Yahoo gets WAY less spam - I've only received ONE spam message in the last month, while hotmail gave me 58 in the last week. And you won't be selling your soul to Bill if you use Yahoo :)