Imaginary Billing Problem Means I Can’t Ditch Hotmail

(dirtyblueshirt)

Mavfan has a very old Hotmail account. It’s positively ancient in Internet years, existing since 2001. He was happy to just let the account forward to his wife’s Gmail address until it was hacked and began to send dirty spam messages to everyone the couple has ever e-mailed since 2001. It was time to put a stop to that nonsense, so he set out to shut down the account. Hotmail just won’t let him go.

Okay, we all know how hard Hotmail sucks (real hard). Well, some 6
months ago I began forwarding our old hotmail address (which we’ve had
since ’01) to my wife’s Gmail address.

Unfortnately, within the last two weeks our hotmail account was
hacked, and keeps sending out porn-ish emails to all our contacts
(amassed since 2001, mind you). Efforts to go into Hotmail and close
the account are met with error messages like:

There’s a temporary problem
There’s a temporary problem with the service. Please try again. If you
continue to get this message, try again later.” and
“To close your Hotmail account, you must first cancel your billing
service. Go to Microsoft Account and Billing Services at
https://billing.microsoft.com.”

I have called MSN’s billing dept. There is no issue. There is also no
one in the billing dept who talks to the technical support team, so
they can’t vouch for my good standing.