So, today, the termination of linked accounts finally hit me. I figured "Oh, well, I should just be able to effectively re-link the accounts using the new Alias system, as it's more or less the same thing." But guess what? Nope! You can't add already existing accounts as aliases. So now I have my two main accounts (and a recent third) that were all linked together so that I could easily access them from a single window, and which were well established accounts used in pretty much every single facet of my online existence, and I no longer have any viable way to see messages between them. Instead of just being able to switch to a linked account, I now have to completely log out of one account, refresh the page, and log back in to another account.

This may not seem like a big deal, but when I have to do this EVERY SINGLE TIME I want to check my email accounts for messages, it adds up to days and months and years of extra work over time. For a little bit a math, I'd say I check my email probably 20 times per day on average, switching accounts via linked accounts takes about 1 second, though by logging out, refreshing, and logging back in, as well clicking "log in with a different account" and then typing out my full email and my 13 character password, well, that takes about 20 seconds. Per account. I have three. So now I'm facing an additional 40 seconds every single time I check my accounts, an additional 13 minutes that I have to spend on my email, every day, for absolutely no reason. (And before anyone says "But 20 * 30 = 60!", I'm already logged into one of those three accounts at any point in time, so I only have to log out and back in twice to see the other two.)

So, Microsoft's whole reason for this was, let me get this straight, because linked accounts "helped the bad guys". Hmm. So you're saying that if one account was compromised, well, then all linked accounts were compromised as well! Because, while that didn't give the "bad guy" access to the passwords of those accounts, it gave them access to the accounts themselves, at which point they could read messages and send messages from all those accounts. Okay, that makes sense, except for the fact that with aliases the exact same thing occurs. Shocking.

So my rant aside, here's the actual question. Can you restore the full functionality of my previously linked accounts, using this new alias system. That is to say, I want all three of those accounts to all be linked together, as "aliases", using the same password, I don't care, I was using the same password anyway on all three. Furthermore, I want the emails to come to each of the three aliases individually, with the ability to switch between the inboxes of those aliases. I do NOT want one communal inbox where all the personal emails from my personal account mix up with my business emails from my business account. I want to only see the emails coming to my business account, then switch to only seeing the emails coming from my personal account. If this isn't possible, I'm done with hotmail. It's been a downhill spiral since the outlook update, and I'm just tired of Microsoft screwing over the customers more and more in the name of "progress", when all they're actually doing is making it easier on their databases. It will be a royal pain in the **** to switch over 10+ years of subscriptions and contacts to gmail, but it will be worth it in the long run.