I am currently in the process of moving over from a Linux VPS to a Windows VPS. Due to the limited resources of my current web server I am unable to run an exchange server to handle all of my email, calendar etc. I have therefore decided to make use of the relatively new Outlook.com for all of my website email addresses as it integrates well with the desktop version of Outlook. Previously, I had much more control over my email accounts compared to Outlook. This included the ability to assign multiple addresses to a single mailbox. I knew you could set up an alias for a Hotmail account so I began looking into how to set one up for my Outlook accounts.
First, the most obvious place to select an alias is in Mail settings > Create an outlook alias. The only problem here is that the address cannot be from your custom domain, only @outlook.com, @hotmail.co.uk or @live.co.uk.
Lukily (or not so in my case), there is an alternative.. Now, although this feature is incredibly poorly documented, it is apparently possible to add your own custom address as an alias by logging into your account and going to the following page: Microsoft Account > Notifications > Email > Add an email address. Here you should be able to add your own email address. Now I tried this a number of times but all I received was the following error:
I could never get any further than this step by using this mechanism and nearly gave up. After searching for a little while however I came across this post by Joshua Harley. He had created nifty little tool that utilised the Windows Live Admin Center SDK called wlalias (he also provides the source (C#) should you wish to have a look). I gave it a go setting up one of my accounts like follows:
As you can see, it didn’t go exactly to plan. Luckily however, the tool worked and the email address has been added as an alias as can be seen below:
So there you have it, it is possible to add a custom alias to your email address in Outlook.com.