Microsoft recently introduced an email alias feature for the popular Hotmail service which, said honestly, is pretty good. This is different from username+alias (which Hotmail already does do as does Gmail) in the respect it’s a true alias that does not reveal your actual Hotmail username. When you use username+alias, your username is obviously still visible, but not so with true aliases.
If you want to try Hotmail aliases for yourself, login to your Hotmail account, then click this link:
http://mail.live.com/?rru=createalias
While Hotmail aliases work great, they do not account for your email signature. Any email you compose or reply to using the web-based Hotmail version will obviously include that.
The problem here is that most people tend to forget they most likely placed their primary Hotmail address within their email signature, so if you reply to a mail using an alias and forgot to change or remove your signature, any privacy achieved from the alias is gone at that point.
Should Hotmail have different signatures available for aliases? Yes, it should, but that feature doesn’t exist.
Until the time comes (if ever) that Hotmail has different signatures per alias, you’ll have to remember that when using an alias to manually remove or change your existing signature when composing/replying.
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Wow, that’s pretty dumb on Microsoft’s part.
Yeah there really should be a “Don’t include signature when replying with alias” checkbox or something similar.
You got the point.
I thought this alias deal with hotmail was a great idea… I don’t use a ‘pre-finished signature’ or anything like that so that isn’t a problem for me. However, I wanted to try out the alias before I actually started using it and my husband said that it comes up as my first and last name… which is exactly what I was trying to avoid! I don’t want 7 different email accounts, I am happy with hotmail because it’s the first email address I ever set up and I have used the same account for over 15 years, BUT back in the day privacy wasn’t such an issue so my email is my first and last name. Now as privacy has become an issue I’d like to change that but hotmails alias doesn’t seem to be doing the trick… ugh. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Add a second Hotmail account to your primary; this will allow you to send out mail using a different name. Sign up a second account, logout, log back in with primary account, add in the secondary account, and you will be able to send/receive with the second account using any “sent from” name you wish. This will work with any Hotmail account whether it ends in @hotmail.com @live.com or @msn.com.