Last week Dick Craddock, the Group Program Manager for Windows Live Hotmail, wrote about how you can now use a current email address through the Windows Live Hotmail web interface.
To try it out, you just need to register and validate your email address. Over 30 million people have already registered an email address from another service when signing up for a Windows Live ID to use Xbox, Zune, SkyDrive, or Messenger. If you’ve done the same, then go to www.hotmail.com and sign in with your Windows Live ID. If you don’t have a Windows Live ID, you can sign up for a new Hotmail account now and use your own email address when registering.
Well I went through the process to show you what to expect as you set things up so here are some screenshots to walk you through getting setup.
You start out on the sign up page where you enter the email address you want to access with the Hotmail interface.
Once you have entered all your personal data to sign up for the account you will be taken to the Hotmail inbox. Look for this banner near the top and click on the highlighted blue link to start the final steps of setting up your email address for access.
On the next screen you will be prompted to send a verification email to the email address you signed up with. This of course is to verify you have the password and access to that account.
The results of pushing the Send email button in the previous screen.
Once you receive the verification email in the account you signed up with and clicked on the verify link you will get the following screen. You will need to provide the account password here to gain access to it.
When you hit the next button after entering the password you have a couple more choices to make on the setup. You can opt to have emails from the account you signed up with put in their own folder or directly in the inbox. The last choice is to flag emails from this account with a uniquely colored envelope icon. This is probably most useful if your directing the email straight to the inbox and there might be other accounts in the same inbox.
Once you click that Save button your back to your inbox and the email account you added will start to grab any email that is in it.
When you set this up it opts to keep emails on the original account by default. If you want them removed then you will need to uncheck that box on the account setup page.
Go into the Hotmail options and click on the Sending/receiving email from other accounts link.
Click the Edit link to get to the account options page:
Uncheck the Leave a copy of my messages on the server and you will only get the messages in the Hotmail interface.
