I created a new Outlook.com email address instead of renaming existing. How can I free up the new account?

To list out what has happened / will happen here:

1. you created a brand new account @outlook.com.
2. you then renamed that @outlook.com account to something else. This would have made the @outlook.com address an alias of whatever you renamed to.

Now that the @outlook.com address is an alias you can remove it from it's current account association and wait for 30 days for it to become available for use by other accounts never associated with the initial account. 

Hi Dan, thanks for this reply. Changing the account to an alias will appease most of us, I think, if the account does become available after 30 days. I will certainly be trying that, and I guess I'll come back with confirmation of results in a month.

Cheers

To list out what has happened / will happen here:

1. you created a brand new account @outlook.com.
2. you then renamed that @outlook.com account to something else. This would have made the @outlook.com address an alias of whatever you renamed to.

Now that the @outlook.com address is an alias you can remove it from it's current account association and wait for 30 days for it to become available for use by other accounts never associated with the initial account. 

So are you saying that we can have an address available in 30 days instead of 270 if we rename the account, making our desired address an alias, and then remove the alias?

If that is definitely true, it is good news. I was under the assumption that forcing it to become an alias in this way did not make it so the address would recycle in 30 days, and I would still have to wait 270.

Although waiting 30 days and then trying again is not perfect, it is infinitely better than waiting 270 days.

To list out what has happened / will happen here:

1. you created a brand new account @outlook.com.
2. you then renamed that @outlook.com account to something else. This would have made the @outlook.com address an alias of whatever you renamed to.

Now that the @outlook.com address is an alias you can remove it from it's current account association and wait for 30 days for it to become available for use by other accounts never associated with the initial account.

Most of the replies above assume we we made a mistake.  Some of us were we're not ready to make the 'transition' to outlook.com just yet but needed to claims outlook.com email address before some else did in case we wanted to make the transition to outlook.com at a later date.

So we 'reserved' our outlook.com email address by adding it as an alias.

I for one do NOT accept that the suggested solution is to wait the 270 days. It wouldn't work if it was 30 days, 7, 1 or none.  If you delete your account the chances are pretty high some else will claim it after the time has elapsed, despite you setting a reminder, are we meant to refresh the page all day until it hopefully becomes available.

It's too risky and not a solution.

The only acceptable solution would be for Microsoft to provide us with the functionality to turn/merge aliases or linked accounts into the primary ID.

As outlook.com is a new service, I am still hopeful that one day Microsoft will provide this functionality, they obviously know that their users require the functionality so just maybe they're working on it until they get it right.