Hotmail Gets Email Aliases, Like Gmail But Better

In an effort to catch-up to competitor’s service, notably, Gmail, Microsoft has just introduced a new email alias feature for Hotmail users, that takes them one step ahead in the competition. Email alias are alternative email addresses that users can generate on-the-fly for easy organization and also to counter spam.

Like Gmail, Hotmail address holders can add a plus (+) sign and any characters after that to create an alternate email address. For example, if your email address is [email protected] you can create [email protected] when you signup for email newsletters on websites. Email sent to this alias will still be delivered to your inbox or to a particular folder. This enables you to quickly filter different types of incoming email.

However, with the plus addresses, it’s still very easy to determine your actual email address and does not necessarily help you stop spam. So Microsoft introduced a new kind of alias. The second type of email aliases lets you create completely different email addresses that you can use to receive email into your primary account without anyone knowing what your primary email address is.

For example, you can create freddie@hotmail or mrbigbrains@hotmail and still receive mails on your primary inbox [email protected].

What’s more? Once you’re done with an alias, you can just turn it off ensuring that future unwanted messages that are sent to that alias don’t land in your inbox.

You can add up to five aliases per year to your Hotmail account and up to fifteen aliases in total.

So go ahead, get a new Hotmail address.

Related: Use Hotmail to send/receive emails from other POP accounts