How to Revert Outlook.com to Hotmail Account and Interface

We have already see on how to convert your Hotmail or Live or Microsoft account to Outlook.com Email Id. But when analyzing some of the queries in Google Analytics for my site, I found some readers would like to revert or undo the Outlook.com email address to Hotmail.

Causes for Going Back from Outlook.com to Hotmail?

1. 1. In the first instance, when you have upgraded your Hotmail account to Outlook.com (I mean the account, not the interface), Outlook.com email address becomes the primary email. So in order to login to Hotmail Account or for using as Microsoft Account (which is nothing but the “Windows Live Id” or MSN Id”) you need to use the Outlook.com Id only. (Though your old Hotmail account acts as an “alias”).
   2. When you send email to your friends, relatives, employees, colleagues using this new Outlook.com id, the recipients of the email will see your address as yourname@outlook.com which may be totally new and out of the world. This will also spark the Junk and Spam services to detect your email as Spam or Junk, as your email is relatively new and like a baby to email services.
   3. The toughest part is you have to reconfigure your email clients on your different phones, mobiles, tablets, smartphones, iPhone, Android etc.

How to Revert or Undo Outlook.com to Hotmail?

Visit http://www.outlook.com and sign-in with your @outlook.com address.

Visit the following page and manage the email ids associated with your Microsoft Account.

https://account.live.com/ManageAssocIds

[Img Source : Techulator.com]

As you can see, your @outlook.com address is the preferred email address or the primary one. Your old Hotmail account is under Other email addresses. Click Remove link below that id.

Some confirmation messages will follow and in that screen, click on the “Remove”button.

Note: Don’t worry! You are not going to loose anything here.

You will also see a successful confirmation message saying that your Hotmail account is removed from your Microsoft account.

Next, visit this page: https://account.live.com/ChangeId.aspx

Sometimes, you are asked to login with your new Outlook.com address. Login with those credentials. There you get two options. Select the option that says “Create a new email address”. Now don’t be fooled thinking that you need to provide a new Hotmail Id altogether.

Just provide your old Hotmail email address you just removed and click Save.

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Update : At present, it looks like that Microsoft removed the option to go back from your new @outlook.com address to @hotmail.com or Hotmail account address. As mentioned in the comments, the new screenshot looks like this:

I will try to update this post, as soon as I find a solution for this problem.

Update 2 : It looks like Microsoft is slowly phasing out Hotmail and switching all users to Outlook.com address. Here is the official message on windows  website.

Over time, Hotmail will be phased out and Outlook.com will be the free email service from Microsoft. As part of this transition, we’ve removed the option to switch back to Hotmail.

So for now there is no way you can switch back to Hotmail.

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Note: Here is my small thought. As you can see the second option which says “Use a different address” , you can provide any other account of your choice which will be your primary Microsoft account. So if you are like me, having Gmail Id as the Microsoft account, you can provide that old Gmail account as Microsoft account again. This way you can revert back to the old Gmail as Windows Live Id, or any other email service id like Yahoo, Rediff which you might have used for Microsoft account.

Voila! You have revert back to your old Hotmail account again. One more advantage is that, your new Outlook.com email address still remains and becomes an alias automatically and you will continue to receive any mails sent to that email id also.

How to Switch Back to Old Hotmail Interface?

Finally a small tip which you may like. Though you changed the Outlook back to Hotmail, your interface will be the same of Outlook.com if you have upgraded earlier. To switch back to old Hotmail interface, click on “Gears icon” at the top right hand corner and then click on “Switch back to Hotmail” option. This will get back your Hotmail interface.

Problems for UK and Other Users?

The most common problem UK users will be facing is that their Hotmail ids will be of the form @hotmail.co.uk.

So when you try to revert back, you may not find the option @hotmail.co.uk in the drop-box.

The solution is to change your Country Settings and Time Zone settings to UK, when you are in Outlook.com. A detailed post on how to do it is mentioned here.

The above post mentions steps for Hotmail account, but the steps are similar for Outlook.com also.

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Luckily this kind of problem, doesn’t arise with Hotmail users having @hotmail.com as their id. You can see a screenshot on where to change the country specific settings below: