Check the last Hotmail login (last time someone signed in to your email account)
Whenever you login to your Hotmail account, it leaves a trace with a date and time; wouldn't it be nice to be able to tell when someone last accessed your Windows Live Hotmail profile and emails? A detailed breakdown of who signed in to your account, from what IP address and when exactly (date and time) is difficult to obtain without a court order, you can easily find out when the last Hotmail login occurred on any machine you have access to - laptop or desktop computer, as you'll learn on this page.
Find out the last time your Hotmail account was accessed
Whenever you or someone else tries to access your Hotmail account and read your emails, it creates a record (history and cookies) on the computer that was used. A very simply way to find out when the last login your Hotmail account happened is to look at these logs.
- In Internet Explorer, simply press the Ctrl+H keyboard shortcut to load the browsing history side panel - this includes all recent history since it was last cleared:
- In the screenshot above, we navigated to two random websites and then went through the Hotmail login process; notice that when you click on a day / date and time, all the visited websites expand, and you can click on them to see what pages were viewed for this site.
- While we blurred out the Hotmail user name, note that you can also see which Hotmail account was signed in to from the email address displayed in the browsing history.
Since the new Hotmail doesn't require page reloads to switch from one email folder to another, you may not see one "hit" per page visited or emails viewed. - To look at the timestamp (date & time) of the last Hotmail login and/or visits to your Windows Live Hotmail account, just right-click on any of the pages visited, and choose "Properties".
- In Mozilla Firefox, the same keyboard shortcut works; you can also go to View > Sidebar > History. to get a breakdown of date and time when your Hotmail account was last accessed.
- In the Google Chrome web browser, open a new tab and click on "History" at the bottom.
- In Apple's Safari browser, just click on the "History" menu and pick a date.
- And in the Opera web browser, hit once or twice F4 to see the side panels, and click on the History button (usually a clock icon of some kind, depending on the skin you are using).
Tip: it is possible that the last login to your Hotmail account happened on a computer you do not have access to, in which case you will not be able to determine the dates and times someone last signed in.
There are also two other cases where it is next to extremely difficult to know if and when someone tried to access your emails or hack your account, if they anonymously login to Hotmail, or if they erase Hotmail history and/or cookies.
New Hotmail, MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail & Live email are all referring to the same free webmail service offered by Microsoft and Windows Live Team (works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X). Microsoft Corporation, Apple, and other companies own the copyright or trademark to these and other terms mentioned.