OK, I’m hoping someone out there can help with this. Otherwise Microsoft are being stupid, though that wouldn’t exactly be the first time.
Right, so when I first signed up to MSN Messenger (now Windows Live Messenger), you had to have a Hotmail account to use it. That was the long and the short of it, so I signed up for one and never used it for anything else. This is all well and good, but occasionally people on my MSN list email me via that address, and of course I never see their mail because I don’t check the fucker.
Of course in recent years, with the advent or more services from Microsoft such as Windows Live ID (or whatever it’s bloody called now, it used to be Passport) you can use your own email address in messenger. You’ll probably be bombed with spam from beyond the ninth circle of Hell, but hey – I can get round that by setting up an auto-responder on an otherwise unused email address. People spamming me will get nowhere, and people mailing me in error will get a helpful reply.
So that’s grand, and I’ve set one up, and associated it with my Hotmail/Live/Messenger account or whatever it is, and can now sign into Messenger with this new address… but apparently I’m a brand new user and I don’t have any contacts. So here’s my question to y’all – is there a way to get this new address/ID onto my existing Messenger account? I can’t find a way and I’ve been digging in the unhelpful option screens and labyrinthine “help” pages, and I can find no way to do this.
For clarity, I want to be able to sign into my existing Messenger account with all my contacts etc but using the new email address that I created today.
Otherwise I’m going to have to email everyone on my list and do that tedious “I’m changing my address, please add my new one” bollocks.
Weak.
–c.
I did this once – I used Trillian (or Gaim, now Pidgin, not sure what – your common-or-garden multi-network IM client anyhoo) and set up two MSN Messenger account profiles on it – the old one and the new one, and had them running at the same time. Due to the client only having one set of MSN buddy area type thingies, it somehow managed to add all my old MSN contacts onto my new address.