Hotmail was one of the first web-based email services, launched in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith.
It was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 and rebranded as MSN Hotmail.
Over the years, Hotmail underwent several changes and improvements, such as adding spam filtering, virus scanning, storage space, calendar, contacts and more.
In 2012, Microsoft decided to replace Hotmail with a new service called Outlook.com, which was based on the same technology as the desktop version of Outlook.
Outlook.com offered a sleeker and more modern interface, with features like conversation view, Focused Inbox, dark mode, desktop notifications and integration with other Microsoft services like OneDrive, Skype and Office 365.
We have already seen 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.
However, not everyone was happy with the change from Hotmail to Outlook.com. Some users preferred the old interface or found the new one confusing or cluttered.
Fortunately, Microsoft allowed users to keep their @hotmail.com email addresses and switch back to the old interface if they wanted to.
How to Switch back to the old Hotmail Interface from Outlook.com?
You need to follow these steps:
- Sign in to your Outlook.com account using your @hotmail.com email address and password.
- Click on the gear icon at the top right corner of the screen and select View all Outlook settings.
- In the Settings pane that opens up, click on Mail > Switch back to Hotmail.
- Confirm your choice by clicking on Switch back.
Can you change a Hotmail address to Outlook?
If you have a Hotmail account and want to switch to Outlook.com, you don’t need to create a new email address. You can simply upgrade your existing account to Outlook.com and keep your old Hotmail address. Here’s how:
- Go to Outlook.com and sign in with your Hotmail credentials.
- Click on the gear icon in the top right corner and select View all Outlook settings.
- Under Sync email, click on Manage or choose a primary alias.
- You will see a list of aliases associated with your account. If you don’t have an Outlook.com alias yet, click on Add email and follow the instructions to create one.
- Once you have an Outlook.com alias, you can make it your primary alias by clicking on Make primary next to it. This will change your sign-in name and the email address that appears on your outgoing messages.
- You can also remove your old Hotmail alias if you want, but this is optional. You will still be able to receive emails sent to your Hotmail address even if you remove it as an alias.
That’s it! You have successfully changed
You will then be redirected to the old Hotmail interface that you are familiar with. You can still access your emails, contacts and calendar as before.
However, you will miss out on some of the features and updates that are available only on Outlook.com.
Switch back to Outlook.com from Hotmail
you can do so by following these steps:
- Sign in to your Hotmail account using your @hotmail.com email address and password.
- Click on Options at the top right corner of the screen and select Upgrade to Outlook.com.
- Confirm your choice by clicking on Upgrade.
You will then be redirected to Outlook.com with a new interface that matches your Microsoft account theme. You can enjoy all the benefits of Outlook.com such as enhanced security, cloud storage integration and collaboration tools.
Whether you choose Hotmail or Outlook.com for your web-based email service depends on your personal preference and needs.
Both services offer reliable and convenient ways to communicate online. However, if you want a more modern and feature-rich experience that is compatible with other Microsoft products, you might want to give Outlook.com a try.
Causes for Going Back from Outlook.com to Hotmail?
- 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”).
- 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.
- 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.
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.
The above post mentions steps for Hotmail account, but the steps are similar for Outlook.com also.
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:
I read through this site and there is so much handy information, bookmarked 🙂
This does not seem to work in 2019.
I want to change my Outlook.com account to Hotmail email a/c.
How to do it.
I’ve been on calls and live chats with no much help until they finally told me this is not possible.
This is so annoying!!! Please keep this post alive if anybody knows of a solution…. (I’m still hopeful I guess)
“This email is part of a reserved domain. Please enter a different email address.”
This is the message it shows if you try to add an account created on hotmail, that as the steps above shows to press “remove” to be converted to outlook.com.
Once removed from the steps above there’s no turning back at this point.
I think this trick does not work anymore. You can revert Outlook.com email id now, once it has changed. Otherwise, you have to keep using the old Hotmail account.
Yes, I agree that it is not possible to revert Outlook.com to Hotmail anymore.
I was reading some of your articles on this site and I believe this web site is very informative!
Keep on putting up.
well, i have one BIG problem with MS and their changing the interface. It is not usable by me with a screen reader. None of the usual buttons are there and navigation is a real pain now. I use jaws on my windows machine and firefox for the browser. I have tried other browsers only to have the same usability issue. There doesn’t appear to be a way to contact MS and tell them that this is a real show stopper. any suggestions?
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My hotmail account was converted to an outlook account, I have my emails but my contacts did not transfer. Please help. This is driving me crazy.
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Thanks in support of sharing such a nice opinion, paragraph is good, thats why i have read it entirely
Your above solution is good, No doubt………….
one more question : my previous old Id is of hotmail
it is live .But as i had tried so many times it is asking so many questions.
i get the reply on my yahoo mail that you click the link and follow….
According to that when i done then when they are asking Billing Info which i never used or submitted on hotmail their i write Nil But results shows that error. how to recover the password of hotmai ID. Please explain me.
I don’t like the new change to Hotmail to Outlook because I didn’t even say yes or no to this change and they did it all for us. And now that we have it we can’t even change it back this is not good. We need solution to fix this situation and they should have ask yes or no to upgrade the Hotmail to Outlook. I am so confused and mad that they are doing this. Even Emailing people are different and confusing too.
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The new outlook is rubbish
i have tried all the steps but failed. my login id is not displayed as name@outlook.com instead it is displayed as name@hotmail.com but my hotmail interface has been upgraded to outlook. so what to do now.kindly help me to fix this issue.
20 years later, and I’m forced to leave over a terrible gui.
hey, if u don’t mind getting the emails downloaded to ur computer, give Windows Live Mail a try. It has a similar interface as what Hotmail had previously. I use version 2009 but I think version 2011 would do too. The only link I can find that’s developed before the new look: http://www.microsoft.com/en-sg/download/details.aspx?id=29219
i dislike this new outlook
I don’t like how the new hotmail look too. I resort to installing Windows Live Mail as it looks similar to previous hotmail. It has to download emails to my computer but totally worth it for me. This program is found as part of Windows Live Essentials. http://www.microsoft.com/en-sg/download/details.aspx?id=29219
For my main email, I was able to revert to the Windows Live interface. With one of my ghost emails, I cannot revert. The option is not present in the drop box. I hate Outlook’s interface. I have a Win8 computer, but there are a few features I don’t use. I hate the general design, because it feels very 1997 to me. It’s flat and ugly. Pretty soon I expect some Nsync knockoff boyband to pop up and do a cover of Digital Getdown.
we tried to switch back to hotmail from out look but we have not found the option of switchback to hotmail what we do now plz tell us
yea there is noooo longer an option to revert to the old interface. so how do we revert?
they used to have the switch back potion but now stuck with new, why force users and traditional clients to feed @ the troff may be they are programing us to except the pink dolla
r too.
the gear icon does not give option to revert to hotmail. Any other method to revert?
i followed the steps to revert my outlook account to the hotmail interface and yet when i click profile on the hotmail interface it takes me back to outlook???? plz help i really dislike the out-‘look’
What do i do now???
Someone help….
i followed the steps but now it says something like this
“The email address associated with your Microsoft account can’t be changed”
thank you. i was about to go crazy with this new interface outlook seemingly forced on to me.
Thanks. You thoroughly well written article have been of immense help to me