...

I signed up for this email two days ago, and it's already been locked. This isn't weird behaviour from Microsoft, but it feels weird to me! I've made about a dozen emails in my lifetime, and I've never "been suspended for suspicious activity".

Honestly, I thought I'd been hacked. I thought maybe one of the webrings I'd flipped through, or notes I'd left in guestbooks, had somehow got my data stolen (though I've been to worse places on the internet, and I know, logically, that this kind of stuff doesn't work that way). I haven't used the email or the Microsoft account linked to it for anything other than Neocities. All I wanted was for the site to be separate from my personal email. Anyway, I don't know how this stuff works, despite growing up with it. I really was spooked. I wasn't hacked, but if I was, would they have my password? Because I've been using the same password for everything my whole life.

Long story short, I got my account back. It was a pretty quick verification process. I don't think it will happen again, but it bothers me, not knowing why it happened in the first place. Was my activity somehow analyzed, and determined to be a bot? I mean, I've failed captchas before, both out of plain stupidity and of an obsession with private browsers. (Google and Microsoft especially don't like that shit. Privacy, I mean, not stupidity.)

After skimming a few Reddit threads, my only real theory is that my first and only two emails I received and opened (from Neocities) were labelled as junk, and because they were a little out of place for a new account, it was suspicious of me to interact with them? Not that that makes any sense, but I wouldn't put it past whatever AI Microsoft has on the job of detecting bots. To be fair, I don't know that it thought I was a bot anyway. It never explained anything at all—just signed me out, said I'd violated some code of conduct, and asked me to verify with a phone number and another email.

Well, that's the whole story. Maybe it's a little funny. Maybe it's boring. I'm too tired to make any sense of it, but maybe you can, so I thought I might as well put it out there.

— Barb