Introduced in 2006, linked accounts for Outlook.com allowed users to quickly switch between different accounts. Microsoft is going to kill the linked accounts over the next couple of months due to security concerns. If you have a linked account to your primary Outlook account, your primary account will be vulnerable to hacking if your secondary accounts have weak passwords.
While this move may be frustrating for some, Microsoft is offering a few new features to make the transition less painful. Outlook.com will soon support mail forwarding and sending email from another account. This means that you can have all of your email from secondary accounts forwarded to Outlook.com so you won’t ever have to log into your secondary accounts any more. Microsoft is also working on a way to “move an alias,” which will allow you to move one email account to another. There’s no details about when “move an alias” will come but Microsoft says to “stay tuned.”
It’s nice to see Microsoft take security more seriously by killing linked accounts and implementing two-factor authentication for Microsoft accounts. If you use linked accounts with Outlook.com, now’s a good time to make sure you have strong and unique passwords for all of your accounts.
[Source: Outlook Blog]
