You need to provide a bit more information in order for anyone to help you with this problem. What email address are you referring to? Many people have multiple email addresses with different providers. What email client are you using?

i have a gmail address but it says now that its not an active account.

gmail accounts are provided by Google and are referred too as webmail accounts. It may have lapsed because you have not used it for some time or use of the account has broken gmail rules. If it has truly lapsed (inactive) then I would expect that either you can get Google to reactivate it or recreate the account using the same username. In creating a new account of the same name, I would not expect you to receive the backlog of emails sent to you during the period it was inactive. Hope this helps.