I set up an office live account with a free .com domain. When this ended and was handed over to Melbourne IT. I didn't take up Office 365 but retained the .com domain for an email account.

I continued to access the email account via hotmail, which was fine until the beginning of this year and it would only allow sending out of mails.

I create an outlook.com alias and this received emails fine.

The .com domain expires soon and isn't being renewed.

 I've tried to make the outlook.com address the primary but I just get an error saying try again later.

Other posts here suggest that even if I do manage to make it the primary I might lose all emails.

Can anyone advise if I can make the outlook account the primary and assure me I won't lose the emails

All help most gratefully received and appreciated.