Hotmail Aliases

The Hotmail team blogged about email aliases earlier this year – I didn’t know either technique was available, so thought I’d republish the ADHD version here.

Ultra-short version: You can add a tag (essentially) to your hotmail email address and use Sweep (mail rules) to manage emails to that address, or you can create a full-blown additional email address.

Examples!

Let’s say your email was preposterousexample @example.com (Aside: why example.com and not hotmail.com? Cos I don’t want anyone getting spammed when a bot reads this post)

Plus-sign-based Email Address Uniquification

preposterousexample+diamondshopping@example.com
or
preposterousexample+securitynewsletter@example.com

See the Hotmail feature docs for more details.

Actual aliasing – adding email addresses

Hotmail allow 5 aliases to be created each year (to a max of 15) – essentially, new, linked email addresses.

seeminglyunrelatedexample@example.com

So the person getting this one would have no clue it’s in any way related to your preposterousexample address.

Nice. Not sure how I’ll use it yet. Possibly forgreatevil(@example.com).