Most people tend to confuse Hotmail and outlook. While the difference is not as significant, here is how you can look at it; outlook is a Microsoft email program and Hotmail, which also just recently changed to outlook.com, is their email service provider.
In simple terms, Outlook can be defined as the site that allows you to browse your Hotmail account (outlook.com account). It is a software service that lets you send and receive emails right from the comfort of your home, office, or from anywhere you are.
With regular updates and changes, the service keeps getting better at all angles. This includes the user interface, their tools, and features, third-party app integrations like Microsoft 365, dropbox, and more
You can always access it via mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and if you want to be fancy or for convenience, it is also accessible via smart TVs.
How to Sign UP a Hotmail/Outlook.com Account?
Hotmail login and sign-up are probably some of the easiest things to do. It is simple, fast, and efficient. Follow this easy process to create an account;
- The very first step is to visit Hotmail’s “sign-up page“
- When the application form pops up, provide your email address, or you can choose to use your phone number instead.
- If you don’t have an email already and don’t want to use your phone number, click the “Get a new email address” link on the same page and hit “next” to complete the process.
- On the next page, you will be asked to create a password. Keep two things in mind while creating your new Hotmail password; make sure it is strong and that you can always remember it, as you will be using it every time you log in
Always make sure that your password meets the requirements; this includes checking the upper case letters, digits, as well as special characters
- The next window will ask for your names; flirts and last
- Enter your country
- Enter your date of birth
- Enter your phone number and “click send code”
- You will receive an OTP (One Time Password) text
- Enter the password and click the Next button
- The next window will take you to an outlook tutorial page after which you can now send and receive emails
The OTP is an important step for security reasons and to verify that the details you are providing are actually correct. It also helps you to easily recover your account if you lose your password or someone else accesses your account without your authorization.
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Hotmail/Outlook Login
Once you create your account, you don’t need to remember many details to be logging on. Here are Hotmail login details you can use to sign in to your outlook.com/ Hotmail account;
- Visit the outlook sign-in page
- Enter your email address or your phone number and click “next”
- Enter your password and “sign-in”
If you want to stay signed in so you don’t have to keep entering these details every time you need to open a new mail, just check the “keep me signed in” box. However, this is not recommended for shared computers. Only save your login details if this is your private device.
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Some Hotmail Login Issues, and How to Solve them?
There are many reasons why your Hotmail login may begin to malfunction. If you are having problems signing in to your Hotmail or outlook.com account, here could be some of the reasons and how to solve them;
- The first reason could be that your caps lock is on. While you may not have thought about this initially, note that passwords are the main and a very sensitive part of your Hotmail login. Make sure the caps lock are turned off
- You also want to check the spelling of your email address. Even just one wrong letter may cause you inaccess to your account.
- Make sure outlook.com service status is perfect. Sometimes it is not just you. It could also be the system. When they are running system upgrades, most of the time they will temporarily shut down the site. In some cases, the site will still seem like it’s running but wouldn’t really be giving great services.
Before you start contacting the customer support agents or trying out other ways to log into your account, first check to confirm that the service status is okay.
- You might also try to turn off automatic login or log out and then log in, to see if it will work
- Resetting your password might also work especially if you recently change your password. Try using the old one and if it works, lock your device then unlock it with your new password.
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Hotmail Login Still not Working?
Even after trying out the above-mentioned issues and their solutions, your Hotmail login is still not working? There are multiple types of problems that may lead to difficulty logging in to your account. How to resolve these problems depends on the type of issue it is.
If the issue is your user name, you can;
- visit the recover username page to lookup your username
- request for a security code to be sent to your phone number or your email address (the ones you used to create your account)
If the issue is your account is locked, you can;
- Create a new password to be able to log in.
- Request for a security code
If the issue is your password or verification, you will be required to reset your password.
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Hotmail Login Password Reset
If you lost your password, it shouldn’t be a cause for panic and frustration. Creating a new password is easy;
- The very first step is to visit the main Hotmail login page and go to the reset your password page to recover your account.
- Secondly, input the mail address you used while creating your account and select “next” to follow all the prompts and directions provided to reset.
Hotmail Login Features
Once you create your Hotmail account, sending and receiving messages is not the only benefit you get. Hotmail provides a lot of features to make using it fast, easy, convenient, and effective. They also keep updating their software and services with the latest upgrades to improve the user experience.
Here are some important features you can expect to use once you log in;
- Flag Important Messages
We all have that important email we get and don’t want it to mix or go down with the others. Hotmail gives you an option to keep it at the top of your inbox. The feature is called “flag”.
Whether you are subscribed to a very important blog, or it could be your favorite influencer, and you always want to reach and read their messages faster in the future, the flag feature allows you to locate them faster.
Their “keep this message at the top” option lets your important messages remain at the top and not move down with the others. This makes it possible for you to arrange your emails in a way that you can access them faster.
- Instant Actions
Instant actions, just like the name suggests, is a feature that allows you to carry out an important activity with just one click. “Flag important emails” above can be classified as an instant action. To find this option in your account;
- Log in to your account
- On the home page, click options
- Click more options
- Hit customizing Hotmail
- Then from the drop-down menu on this window, click instant actions
Apart from the flag feature, other instant actions include sweep, junk, moving and categorizing emails, and more.
- Schedule Clean-up
Once in a while, we tend to subscribe to an email list we really didn’t intend to be a part of. Or we sign up for a newsletter that later proves not to be as useful. There will always be an option to unsubscribe from such kinds of emails.
However, if they were once useful to you that you subscribed, they may also be useful to you sometime in the future. If you don’t want to unsubscribe, you can always schedule a clean-up.
This feature allows you to delete messages from particular senders, individually and automatically as you schedule them. Some of the emails you might want to schedule for clean-up in your inbox could be such as daily offers. In this case, the “schedule clean-up” feature can come in handy.
To schedule a clean-up, select messages from the particular sender, hit “sweep” then hit “schedule cleanup”. Here are some options you will get from this last window;
- “Keep only recent messages from this sender”
- Delete messages older than 10 days. (There are a couple of options given here including 3 days, 30, and/ or 60 days).
- Move messages older than 3, 10, 30, or 60 days to another (specific) folder
Pick where you want the messages to go and “select” or “save” or hit the “schedule clean up”.
- Folder management
The folder management tool is exactly for the purpose of what the name suggests; managing your folders. Most people receive different types of emails every day. They could be from school, work, church, online stores, and other lists and newsletters you might have subscribed to.
If you like to classify these emails differently in different categories, Hotmail has made it easy for you to create and manage folders. Here is how you do it;
Right-click on the “folder” options and all the folders you have created will display. If you want to create a new folder, just hit the “new” tab and name it. You can also create a new folder while saving an email. Open the email, hit “move email” to open the folders window, hit “new”, name the new folder, and save the email there, simple!
This not only makes it easy for email categorization, but also saves time and energy while you are trying to access specific mails.
- One-click unsubscribe
This feature is present in many email services and software. If you have especially used Gmail before you will definitely notice the similarities. They all work almost the same, if not exactly the same.
If you don’t want to receive any more messages from a particular sender, all you need to do is click the “unsubscribe” button right at the bottom of the email.
Once you click this button to basically unsubscribe from a message, or newsletter, or email list, Hotmail will notify the sender that you (a user) want to unsubscribe. It will then further filter and move any existing messages from the sender into the “junk” folder.
- Photo Album and Attachments
In most email services, when you attach an image, a video, or any other files and documents to your email, you can’t really see them while typing. This was the same case with Hotmail and outlook.com before their major updates.
But everything is different now. Once you attach your documents and images, you can still see them as you continue typing. You also don’t need to compress or split your emails and large attachments to fit the space limits as Hotmail allows you to send your attachments via the SkyDrive, a feature that they offer.
One more update they recently made and added to their features is the “forgot attachment” detector. This attachment detector lets you know when you forget to attach documents and images to your emails.
It pops up right before you send the email with the “forgot attachment” prompt. This way, if you had any intentions to add any attachments, you can easily go back and add them.
Conclusion
These features, with a lot of other services Hotmail offers, are why they serve over 200 million users every single day. Whether it is for professional purposes or individual and personal issues, you have everything at your disposal to help you send your messages in an effective way.
And, the Hotmail login process is simple, just as it is to work with the entire software. Their customer support agents are also always active and available to help you out with any queries. Check out their “support center” to choose the customer support method you are eligible for and that is most convenient for you.