Hotmail account repeatedly locked

I had the same issue with my Hotmail account being temporarily locked due to "unusual activity", also since 1/9/2022. I also received the message "Usage limit exceeded. Try again tomorrow" when I tried to "verify" my account. Multiple back-and-forths with Microsoft support didn't help.

SOLUTION: It turns out that my problem was that I had too many emails in my "Send" folder! I didn't see this mentioned anywhere as a potential problem but once I deleted most of them, my problem has been solved. Just a lucky guess on my part. Here's what I did:

Go to Settings

Click on "View all Outlook settings"

Click on "General" and then "Storage"

Scroll down to the "Send" folder

On the right, under "Empty", you can select either 3, 6, or 12 months (to delete all emails in the "Send" folder that are older than that number of months).

I had over 24,000 emails in there, since I have been using this same Hotmail account for many years. It would be nice if there were a way to tell Hotmail to delete emails from the "Send" file after a year or two, the same way it deletes emails from the "Delete" folder after 30 days.

Hope this helps some of you!

I have been banging my head for the last few days with the Microsoft support team and they haven't got a clue on how to fix this. You are a genius. They should be fired. :)

Dear goodmorning, could you please give me urgently the contact details of Microsoft support team?

Hi Everyone, I also had the same issue as you all where I could not send any emails but could receive them. Not sure why but my account is now ok and I can send emails again. Please note I received the below message from Microsoft support saying they have rolled out a fix. I did not use this recovery method as my account was sorted on its own. But you guys may want to try it if you wish. This is the message I got. Hope it helps:
"I'd like to inform you that the fix related to the account blocked has now been deployed by our Engineers team. I would request you to please openhttps://account.live.com/reputationcheck?ru=https://outlook.live.com/owa/and follow the recovery flow.If you are unable to verify the account, kindly send us the screenshots of the error. Please send the screenshot as an attachment instead of copy/pasting."

Today I was able to send emails as normal from outlook on the internet.

I took no actions, such as deleting sent messages etc.

I have not received any notification from Microsoft about the fix.