New Outlook won't let me add my outlook email account.

Hi!

Like @TinkerUK, I have one of those ancient Outlook aliases as well, but it's not a ten-digit one — it looks like outlook_****@outlook.com**, where the X stands for a hexadecimal digit (and there are 16 of those). Eons ago, Microsoft has "migrated" my primary alias to my proper email address, but that Outlook address still shows up on Outlook Mail (although only on the web version!).

It's also the only account which I have with Microsoft that is also tied to my 365 family subscription — where I have plenty of free space (unlike on the other email services I use). My idea was to funnel all email to Microsoft's servers and get rid of those nagging messages about "you don't have enough space in your mailbox".

However, for that work, obviously I need to be able to send emails, at least to outlook_****@outlook.com**, so that I can later on start forwarding everything to that account. Alas... this doesn't work, since Microsoft's emal servers explicitly say that "this mailbox doesn't exist".

Ok, fine.. That's a catch-22, though. I can certainly *not* send any email to that address. But on the other hand, I cannot simply forward any other address to that one — since it will always be rejected. Nevertheless, the mailbox does exist — I just need to use my primary email address (configured as an alias) for essentially logging into everything Microsoft-related. And everything just works. Ironically, the only thing that does not work is sending email to that mailbox.

I also followed the suggestion earlier, of changing the primary alias to something else (because, well, the "old " one might be somehow "stuck"). I did that, and I can confirm that I can do with ay other alias what I previously did with my other alias. Unfortunately, this didn't make outlook_****@outlook.com** to be magically active again; whatever alias I use, that mailbox simply refuses to accept email, or even any attempts to authenticate with it (although, as said, that doesn't affect me — all aliases work flawlessly).

I have essentially two options, "fixing" the mailbox, or working around it.

"Fixing" means essentially having a checkbox somewhere in the million different settings saying "Activate your old Outlook,com mailbox address, so that you are able to forward emails to it?" As far as I could look around, such a setting does not exist, and is unknown to search engines, AIs, or the poor unlucky humans that try to figure out what I want/need.

The alternative would be to create a new Outlook account, and set everything up again with it, moving my aliases to the "new" account. Here I have a problem: I might get stuck while trying to latch that new account unto my 365 family subscription. It might complain and deny permission to do so (I haven't tried). And if that happens with all other aliases, too, then I'm bricked out of 365 — because that primary alias of mine is *laos+ used as an administrative account. This means to be extra, extra careful in figuring out what exactly I'm doing — there might not be an option to revert the changes. Not to mention that I haven't the foggiest idea of what will happen with the gazillion of services where I use Microsoft as the identity provider...

And then... there is the hack.

Now, I should explain that, between family, business, and non-profits where I volunteer my work to, I have accumulated, over the years, literally tons of email addresses/aliases (some dating back to 1994!...), which I simply redirect to one of a dozen or so different mailboxes — mostly to avoid the inevitable "your mailbox is almost full" message. So, I scatter email addresses around to different mailboxes, in order to "distribute the load", so to speak, as well as to give me a certain degree of flexibility, by switching providers if needed without losing all contacts from the "usual" mail alias I use. (The same applies to all other aliases as well).

So, my hack is simple. If I cannot send messages directly to outlook_****@outlook.com**, then I can just send them to a "temporary" address (it doesn't matter in which provider; it could be even self-hosted, like I have for a handful of very-low-traffic aliases, which, however, I don't want Google or Microsoft to read and scrap for profiling data). Then, on Outlook, I configure it to pull email from that specific mailbox, and delete what has been retrieved (so as to keep the consumption low). This works rather well, and, to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't have any major issue. Microsoft might limit the number of accounts that can be "pulled" that way, but, so long as it can pull those with the largest number of emails, I'm good … three of those are particularly nasty, all taking over 10 GBytes each — a tiny drop in the vast ocean of storage included with Microsoft 365 Family (but see below).

Essentially, that means using a "useless" mailbox to essentially store "old" mail from other mailboxes. A mailbox which just happens to also allow it to be viewed from the Web interface, although you cannot use it for anything else, really.

This is, obviously, a suboptimal solution — it "fixes" my lack of disk space, sure, but using a very clunky workaround — which might stop being supported by Microsoft at any point in the future (that's the reason why I always use my own alias, on my own domain address, for all purposes — that way, if a provider goes down, discontinues the service, or stops providing it to me for some stupid reason (imagine Google giving up on IMAP support and only allowing Web-based access... or using one of their apps, of course!), I can always redirect, on my side, my personalised email address to any other provider.

A small note. According to this article describing the Microsoft 365 Family characteristics, it's not quite obvious how exactly it works. Basically, Microsoft will store the "text" part of the email on one slice of the cloud storage, which each family member will get, up to 50 GBytes of storage. However, all attachments are stored on the "main" storage … and each family member will get 1 TByte just for themselves. Enough for a few decades :)

This is actually very cleverly done by Microsoft, and, naturally, like what Other Mailbox Providers Which Shall Remain Unnamed, it also allows you to send huge attachments to your friends or colleagues — you'll get a link to download it instead. Clever! The Other Mailbox Providers do the same, of course, but all is bundled together in the meagre space they'll allow you to use. At least, AFAIK; I really didn't search much for the competor's products. None offer Word or Excel, and I happen to consider them essential tools :) So why not use the best of what they offer included in a package that you'll have to pay for anyway?...

I'm not trying to add a gmail account - I can't even add an outlook account to new outlook!

I don't know about @L Tate -- but I do have aliases. Quite a few, actually. Most notably, while I use my main personal email (self-hosted) to login pretty much everywhere that is Microsoft-related (even LinkedIn and GitHub!), the original email address for Outlook.com (created eons ago) has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. It's just the word outlook_ followed by a random sequence of letters (possibly an ancient, pre-historic user ID -- I have no way of knowing).

The "old" Outlook, as well as Outlook.com, and Microsoft Exchange before that, never had the slightest issue with that. It's simply something that I consider "legacy".

I can imagine that the main issues with the "New Outlook" comes from fairly old Outlook.com users, who might have signed up during the Hotmail era (/me points to self) and have gone from migration to migration, eventually bumping into a wall with the New Outlook.

Generally speaking, the New Outlook struggles with those cases where the email address is not the login. While the former is pretty much standard these days, in the past, and not that distant past, one thing was your mailbox account, the other thing was your email address -- of which you could have many (aliases). There wasn't a clear-cut concept of "primary" email address and "secondary" or "alias" email address(es). These were just... email addresses. And then you had your login/password for your mailbox. Simple.

For well over a decade or so, however, mailbox providers (not only Microsoft, of course) have moved to the concept that the "main" email address is the login username. This makes sense, because, the way email works, all email addresses must be unique world-wide and tied to a specific user forever. As such, they are prime candidates for becoming usernames. Nothing wrong with that approach, of course.

The problem, AFAICS, is that so-called "legacy users" progressively migrated from having a login/password combination to unlock their mailbox to the contemporary usage of having their email address as a replacement for their "old" login.

In general, these progressive migrations have worked out without many hiccups. It's just that one day you still used the login/password method, and on the next day, you started using your brand new "Microsoft Account ID" to log in instead (which could actually use a different address, unrelated to your old Hotmail address). And, at some point, the migration was complete; the old login/password method ceased to exist; instead, you used your Microsoft Account ID to essentially connect to everything that is Microsoft-related. There isn't even a choice for "reverting" the process, since, technically, the legacy login/password don't even exist in their systems any more (I even forgot them by now; likewise with OneDrive, which was bought by Microsoft when it was still called SkyDrive, and those accounts were also migrated to the new system).

That doesn't mean that your ancient, legacy mailbox from Jurassic times disappeared. It's still there (no emails ever lost!). There is an internal mechanism to connect whatever email addresses you have registered with Microsoft to that mailbox. And the mailbox has its own ID, which only matters for the Microsoft DevOps team -- we, end-users, cannot do anything with it. We cannot even change it in any way. Even our awareness that such a "mailbox id" exists is being progressively phased out. The "old" Outlook still knows about its existence, though, and still displays it, although there is nothing you can do with it (I believe that you cannot even receive any email there). Clearly, to sort out the mess, Microsoft is keen in getting everybody to switch over to the New Outlook, where such legacy details are cleverly hidden to the end-user. Which I believe to be a Good Thing! It's pointless to show end-users information that they cannot use for anything (it's just confusing!), so I welcome the change.

But at the very very very least, New Outlook must consider the possibility that mailbox providers may not use the entire email address as a valid login for their services. This is a flawed assumption -- just because it holds true for Microsoft, Gmail, and Yahoo (at least!), it is not a "universal requirement". And it's possible that in the corporate world (where Microsoft rules supreme) such "guidelines" are not respected.

So... I appreciate the change to New Outlook in 2024, sure... but I hope Microsoft fixes this "legacy" issue. At least on Windows -- I'm currently on a Mac, and I'm well aware that whatever Microsoft fixes on Windows first may take a while to reach the Mac as well (I had to stop using my Microsoft email address for years until the 365 Suite finally accepted the legacy accounts, even on a Mac -- after years of waiting!). I expect the same to be the case in 2024 -- for a while, just a few millions of disgruntled users will complain, and Microsoft will safely assume that the issue is only "user error" and not worth pursuing further. But at some point, the daughter of a member of the Board will bump into this issue and then, in record time, everything will get fixed....

That is my hope right now :)

Because, frankly, it seems and feels stupid to be using the New Outlook for reading and sending email for essentially all possible platforms and accounts (and I do have many!), with the sole exception being... Microsoft themselves :(

Thank you for your solution, it worked perfect.

Though I didn't delete the Gmail alias, which I used to set up my Microsoft account,
I just made the @outlook email the new 'Primary Alias'.

When back in 'New Outlook', I just added the @outlook email address account - Voilà, it was a green tick and in!
The only thing needed to do then, was to re-sign into the Gmail account, and everything was fine thereafter.

But why Microsoft could have not made this issue clearer in the beginning is beyond me.

Anyway thanks @TinkerUK

i can not add another e-mail account to my outlook