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

I only have a btinternet.com email account and it won't let me add an outlook account

That worked. I had tried everything I could think of. Thank you!

Thank you! Switching back to the old version worked! Although it won't appear when I switch to the new version again so I'm just going to use the old version for now. Thank you though!

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?...

when i enter my email address on new computer it says there is no such email address.