You’re telling this other online service who you are, and they happen to use email addresses as a way to identify you. 1 Email as an identifierĪll the email address is now is an identifier. Once you’ve confirmed that you own an email address, they typically don’t check to make sure that it’s still working. Many online services work exactly the same way. To be clear, Dropbox is just an example here. Dropbox doesn’t check that the email address works it’s just using it to identify you, kind of like your name. You can continue to sign into Dropbox with that email address and password even if the email account goes away and even if the email address stops working. Ever since then, you’ve been using that email address plus a password to sign in to Dropbox. Just because you can still use an email address to log in to another online account doesn’t mean the email account still exists.įor example, let’s say you created a Dropbox account using an email address When you did so, you probably had to respond to an email message sent to that email address to confirm it was yours. There’s a misunderstanding here that I want to clear up. If not, you may be able to create it as a new account.If left alone for too long, the account may be deleted.Attempting to recover the email account through normal means is the first step.Once created, a login ID doesn’t have to be a working email address.

While other services might use your email address as a login ID, that’s all it is.

Old hotmail log in