July. 04, 2013 5:45 pm / Posted by Michael Eric to News
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After killing Hotmail, Monday Microsoft announced that they would be killing the option for users to link multiple email accounts together in Outlook. As a replacement to linked accounts, the company will be promoting their alias system- "a more robust and secure way of managing multiple email address."
First introduced back in 2006, the linked accounts feature lets Outlook/Hotmail users quickly switch to another email account without having to enter a password. While it's a useful feature, Microsoft said it leaves accounts more vulnerable to hackers.
With aliases, users will have one Microsoft account, which will unlock all of their Outlook.com email inboxes.
You can send and receive email from different address and keep it all organized the way you like. And all of this is tied to a single Microsoft account that has your latest and most up-to-date security info.
The system is also being touted as more secure. According to Microsoft, owners who used the secondary accounts less frequently didn't pay as much attention to them. That can mean that those secondary accounts become a back door of sorts into your main Outlook.com accounts.
"We've found that quite often, people who use linked accounts keep their primary account's security info (including password and proofs) up to date, but don't lavish as much care on their secondary accounts," Eric Doerr, group program manager for Microsoft account, wrote in a blog post. "It's easier for a malicious party to compromise one of those secondary accounts, which gives them full access to your primary account."
To smooth the transition between linked accounts and new aliases, Microsoft has put in place a few features.
First, email can be auto-forwarded from those secondary accounts, so even if you have a secondary account you'd like to keep in place you don't always have to sign into it. Likewise, you can configure that additional accounts as a "send-only" address, and send email from that secondary account from the primary Outlook account.
Second, Outlook.com users can still connect their accounts to other provided by Microsoft or Yahoo using SMTP.
Even users might be uncomfortable for this change in short time, we have reason to believe the market of new aliases will absolutely be large since the big improvement of security.
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