Hotmail aliases make it easier to manage split online personalities

One for work, one for play and one to keep spam from hitting the other two – that’s how most people split their email addresses, according to Microsoft. It makes sense, as you don’t want work stuff bothering you at the weekend, and your really don’t want your best friend’s colourful account of what she got up to on the weekend triggering work’s spam filter.

Until now it’s been necessary to keep moving between different accounts to keep these personas separate. Today, however, Microsoft is hoping to bring some efficiency to this, as it will let users set up five ‘aliases’ within their email account. This means you will be able to manage all your email personalities in one place, with one login.

In an effort to stave off competiton from Gmail and Yahoo, Hotmail will let users add five new, unique email addresses to their account per year, up to a maximum of 15. Until now, Hotmail has let users append their existing email with additional words, but this system made it easy to guess the base email address and offered little in terms of privacy. You might want to question what kind of internet activity requires total anonymity, bringing to mind stalking and criminal activities. But most people’s motives are likely to be harmless, even if they just want to have a separate address to use when leaving rants on the Daily Mail website.