Change Hotmail email address

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Billy wants to know “how to change my Hotmail email address?” He also mentions that there is no such provision in the Hotmail settings… and he is 100% correct. So how can you accomplish this?

As you know an email address has to be unique – no two people on the planet can have the same unless they share it. The email address provided by Hotmail has your user ID (Windows Live ID) before the ‘at’ (@) sign followed by hotmail.com. The only way to change a Hotmail email address is to modify the user ID and that you cannot do!

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However, Hotmail provides a forwarding option. This means you can have incoming email directed to another account… but only those which end with hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or is part of Windows Live Custom Domains. I suppose you would have guessed the solution – the only way to change my Hotmail email address is to create a new account to which I forward messages from the old one. Let us see how we can do this.

Sign in at Hotmail and check the forwarding options

The Hotmail options drop downGo to the Hotmail sign in page and login at your account. Cannot do this successfully? Unfortunately, you cannot proceed further. You can always try retrieving the Hotmail password but if this too fails, it’s best to forget about the old one and make a new Hotmail account.

Once you have the Hotmail inbox opened, click on the “Options” link at the extremely near (near the top) and select “More options” from the drop down menu. You will now be in the options and settings section of Windows Live.

Click on the “Forward mail to another e-mail account” under “Manage your account” heading.

Forwarding Hotmail emails to another account

Now select the radio button in front of “Forward your mail to another e-mail account” and enter an alternate Hotmail email address. Don’t have one? No problem, refer how to get another Hotmail email address for detailed instructions with screenshots.

Hotmail forwarding option: Send email to a new account

Anyway, when you’ve created a new Hotmail account come back to the forwarding options of the old one as described above and enter the recently created email address in the text box and hit the “Save” button.

Change a Hotmail email address by forwarding to a new one you create

Please understand that we haven’t changed the email address but made a new account to receive messages from the earlier address. But this does effectively change it, right? Also, you would need to login at your old account once in 90 days else it will automatically be closed by the Hotmail service. Finally, once emails are redirected from an account, they would be deleted from it – thus, the messages would be available only at the account to which they are forwarded.

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