So, you signed up for a Hotmail email address a while ago, and would like to change Hotmail account and get a new email address? No problem: Windows Live Hotmail provides the tools to do this, and let you smoothly transition from an old email address to a new Hotmail account. In this tutorial, we will show you what steps to follow to ensure that you do not lose any mail, and have all your contacts follow you at your new email address. We will also discuss how to change Hotmail account when you are a Hotmail Plus subscriber.
The first step is to create a Hotmail account: it should ideally be easy to memorize for your friends and family; given Hotmail's ever-growing popularity, finding an available user name (the part of your email address that comes before "@hotmail.com" or "@live.com") can be a challenge in and of itself — our tutorial on the topic will give you more details on that.
If you have already changed Hotmail account and signed up for a new one, you can of course skip this step, and move on to letting others know about your new email address.
You will then want to email all your Hotmail contacts from your old address, telling them about your new Hotmail account, and making sure that they add that new email address to their contacts, to avoid having your new account's emails accidentally deleted or marked as junk.
You will be ready to switch to your new Hotmail account just after the last step; after that, you will be able to use your new account full time!
To spare you from having to login to two Hotmail accounts until the change is complete, setting up mail forwarding in Hotmail allows you to relax, and have all emails from your old account automatically forwarded to your new account: by logging into your new Hotmail account only, you will then receive emails from both your old account and the new account. This is your chance to let people who aren't aware of your new email address know that you have changed Hotmail account.
If you want to be really aggressive about your change of Hotmail account, you can even setup an automated vacation reply letting know senders about your new email address: this is an automatic response generated by Hotmail to people who email your old account, and you can include any information you want in the autoresponder.
Finally, you need to make sure that your old Hotmail account remains active until you have completed switched over to your new account: read on.
You use the free version of Hotmail: If you are not a subscriber to the premium Hotmail Plus webmail service (you are subscribing if you pay $20/year, and do not see any ads in your Hotmail account), you will need to make sure to login regularly to your old Hotmail account to keep it active: since the account activity requirements may change over time, we suggest that you login once a month to your old Hotmail account - again, only if you use the standard, free Hotmail.
You are a Hotmail Plus subscriber: You do not need to login at all into their old Hotmail account, since it is automatically kept active as long as your "dues" are current - if you do not renew your Hotmail Plus subscription, your account will automatically revert to a regular, free Hotmail account - and you will need to log into it regularly to keep it active - please see previous paragraph for the details.
Unless you can get a special favor from one of the Hotmail Plus representatives, you will not be able to transfer the remaining time in your active Hotmail Plus subscription towards your new account: but you will have to sign up for Hotmail Plus with your new account, if you wish to retain some of the features (like, no ads!)
When you change Hotmail account, you also have the option to close and delete your old Hotmail account, permanently. This step is not needed, since any Hotmail account not used for a long period of time is automatically closed.