Yesterday I started to look into the issue more closely to figure out if there was an option to create a new Hotmail email address from within an existing account. It took some digging through Hotmail’s page layout to find the page where new email addresses can be added.

Open the Hotmail main page and sign into your Hotmail account if you are not already signed in. You should now see the inbox and the frontpage of the account.

Locate the Options link in the top right corner and select the more options link from the context menu. This opens the main account control panel where you can configure the majority of account related settings. Click on account details under managing your account. Hotmail may ask you to enter your account password again before the next page is displayed.

Click on the your email addresses link under other options. This opens a page listing all linked email addresses and aliases. A click on add an email address allows you to create a new Hotmail or Windows Live account, or to link a third party account to the Hotmail account.

Just enter a new account name and select whether you would like it to be a hotmail.com or live.com account.

The address is automatically added to the account and you can start using the account right away.

You can alternatively open the following link to create new Hotmail email addresses right away. This opens the mail overview page right away where you can add or remove email accounts.

Before we look at a tool that allows you to verify e-mail addresses, we should for a moment look at reasons for verifying addresses. A common reason is a mailing list that you want to clean up, another if you can only remember part of the e-mail address and not all of it.

EToolz is a free portable program for the Windows operating system that can verify if e-mail addresses exist. While it does not work for all messages, it works fine for many including Google E-Mail addresses (Gmail that is), and not for others like Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Switch to the Mail-Check tab of the program once you have started it. Here you need to key in the e-mail address you want to test, and optionally sender and server information as well as a timeout for the connection.

Click the start button once you have entered and modified all parameters to your liking. The program will then try to establish a connection with the selected e-mail address which may or may not work. Gmail will for instance let you know if sender and recipient are accepted. Even better, you will sometimes get information why it is not accepted, for instance if the email account is over quota like in the example on the screenshot above.

Not being able to test multiple e-mail addresses at once is one of the downsides of the program. You can download it from the developer website. Please note that the initial interface language is set to German. Click on Extras > Sprache / Language to change it to English or another of the supported languages.

Another option is to use a proxy email address provided by services such as Tempalias. A proxy email address basically sits between a service or recipient and the real email address. The benefit of this is that the service or recipient do not receive information about the real email address of the user.

Tempalias makes it very easy to create a proxy email address. The user needs to enter the real email address the emails are forwarded to from the proxy email and specify the days or number of received messages the email should be valid for.

Tempalias will automatically generate a random – but never used before – email address for the user that can then be used until the time or mail count runs out.

It has to be noted that the email address will never be accessible again once it runs out. That’s different from most disposable email services where email addresses are always accessible by anyone.

The developers are currently working on a bookmarklet to make it even easier to use the proxy email address service.

PrivateID Reloaded for Thunderbird 3 has been designed to warn the user before the email is send on its way. The extension maintains a list of private email IDs and address books that it will compare all emails with.

It is possible to specify email addresses or strings like domain names to add all of the emails that match the string to the list automatically.

A warning will be displayed if a recipient of a private email is not found in the address books that have been added to the extension’s preferences.

It is still possible to send the email to the recipients but the warning gives the sender the option to rethink that step. It is for instance possible to opt out and change the email account that is used to send out the email.

PrivateID Reloaded can be downloaded from the Mozilla Thunderbird extension repository. The add-on is compatible with Thunderbird 1.5 to 3.0.x.

Update: The script has not been updated for a year and is no longer compatible with Thunderbird. It therefor has been pulled from the official add-on repository.

Sending the display name can be problematic because of several reasons. One is that it is up to the account owner to pick a display name which can sometimes be not appropriate to share with the recipient. Another problem is that it can lead to encoding problems on the recipients side as well.

The Thunderbird extension Address Auto Cleaner takes care of the issue by removing the display name from emails that get send out from the desktop email client. It will automatically remove the display name from the to, cc and bcc fields in Thunderbird before the email is send to the recipients.