How do I know if my account is in the recovery stage after entering the recover key

Hello Trish M, Welcome to Microsoft Community. I am a Microsoft user just like you, I hope you are doing well? Your post is quite confusing. What recovery key are you referring to? What do you mean by encrypted key? You can send screenshots for reference as it will enable me understand better. Have you tried Account Recovery Form? If you haven't, I recommend you try submitting Recovery Form, use link attached: https://account.live.com/acsr After you submit the form, you will receive the results of your recovery request to the working email address you provided at the beginning of the form within 24 hours. Your next steps depend on whether we could verify your account: If it is "We could not verify your account", you will need to keep trying as many times as you want, up to two times per day. If it is "We verified your account", Microsoft will use the same working email to send you instructions for how to sign back into your account. Helpful tips 1 . Answer as many questions as possible. If you’re not sure, guessing is ok — wrong answers don’t count against you. When you get to a question that lets you “add more," fill in as much information as you are able. 2. Use the information you created when you created your account or when it was last updated. 3. Submit the information from a computer that you use regularly. 4. You will be asked to list the email addresses you have used recently and the subject lines of emails you have recently received. Ask family, friends, or business contacts for help in verifying their email addresses and for the subject lines of the last three emails they sent you. 5 Make sure you're using the correct domain for your account, such as hotmail.com, live.com or xbox360.com. Remember that your email address may be country specific. For example, if you created your account in Germany, your domain would probably be "hotmail.de" rather than "hotmail.com". Source: https://support.microsoft.com/article/b19c02d1-a782-dee6-93c3-dc8113b20c42 Please let me know if you need more assistance. Give back to the Community, Help the next person who has this issue by indicating if this reply solved your problem. Click Yes or No below. Warm Regards

I need to clarify what I meant on my last post. I used the 25 digital recovery code, which I previously called encrypted code. All the details are the same, about getting an error message, since I need to recover my critical account.

How do I know if Microsoft received the request. I never received confirmation in my "Where do we Contact you now," email. Hope this makes sense now???

Trish M, i am still unclear on what you mean by digital recovery code/encrypted code. However, how did you send your request to Microsoft?

This will be my last post, as I was successful submitting the relevant information to Microsoft for recovering my account using the 25 digit recovery code, that Microsoft always tells everyone to keep in a safe place to recover your account if you should loose access or get locked out.

I did indicate in my original post that I was having an issue recovering my account using the recovery key, due to error messages in my browser window, and to get feedback if anyone has experienced the same, and once you submit it, does it really take 30 days. I mean if you have the recovery key, why should it take so long??? I did not send screenshots because it showed my account name, don't have time to do edits, and that my community is what we call a security violation. Even Microsoft will remove your email address if you try to put it in the posts. 😀

Hoping since I was able to provide my 25 character, recovery key, perhaps it would take less than 30 days, since it is imperative that I get access to my critical account since I couldn't use the recovery FORM, you know the one, where it asks you a series of questions to prove you are the OWNER.

With my good understanding of technology, I knew it would be best to try again later. "Wala, it worked!" Now I am waiting patiently to hear back from Microsoft to allow me to update my information to regain access to my critical account.

Forget about the words encrypted/digital on my original/previous post. I affiliate those words with the digital data we are trying to recover because it is supposed to be in an encrypted format.

I did not know it would cause so much confusion. Thanks to all for responding and reading my post. If I need to post in the future. I will be cautious as to the choice of words that I select to describe my problem.