Microsoft discontinues linked accounts on Outlook.com

If you have been linking your multiple Outlook.com addresses with one account, a recent announcement from Microsoft might change that. Microsoft would now be discontinuing linked accounts and would be replacing it with 'aliases'.

The announcement came as a blog post on the Microsoft Office Blog. The major reasons for the delinking of the linking feature from Microsoft's strategy are security concerns. The company explains that we are moving towards a system where one account enables you to login to multiple services. While you have your email, there are other services such as Xbox and Office 365 also accessible through the same account. In such a situation, the account details are altogether more important. Due to the same, the company has suggested people to move towards aliases.

In the alias system, you will have one primary alias and can add up to 10 secondary aliases.

If you wish to know the difference, the change will result in you entering your password for each of your accounts when you sign in for them. Earlier, with linked accounts you could switch between any other linked account and you didn't have to enter the password. While the feature was handy, the company states that it also endangered your security information for multiple accounts. Explaining the same, Microsoft said, "We've increasingly found that linked accounts are less robust, and less secure than using aliases."

If you are one of the users of the linked accounts feature, you would certainly be curious about what to do next. As expected, while Microsoft has suggested a way out, though the method requires going a little old school. You can setup email forwarding to consolidate all your accounts into one, and setup the other accounts as alias in the primary one. You can use it to send and receive email, and even sign in.

What needs to be noted is that an Outlook.com account can generally acts as a lot more. While aliases work only for mails, other services such as SkyDrive are still left out. You can no longer 'switch' between multiple SkyDrive accounts and will still need to manually log in and log out to use a different account.

Also, users have observed that personal domain accounts cannot be set up as an alias while they could be linked earlier.

The linking feature will be disabled starting late July. In the meanwhile, Microsoft will be sending out emails to all Outlook.com users with linked accounts informing them about the change and what they need to do get set up with aliases.