Windows Live Admin Center (aka Live Domains)

I’ve just been through the process of moving a personal website and domain to a new hoster. I wanted to separate the email for the domain and use Windows Live Admin Center http://domains.live.com to consolidate external email to Live Mail (Hotmail).

It’s a really cool offering…it’s the service we use extending the Live Mail platform to external orgs, Microsoft Live@edu etc.

However I ran into a small problem that, from my searching, quite a few others have struck so thought I’d put the solution down here as I’m bound to forget it tomorrow.

I set all my DNS records to point my mail account to the live domain, this worked a dream and the tool picked up I’d made the changes and let me go on and create an account and mailbox.

So far so good, I created (or rather re-created) my personal email account and mailbox, then went to login to check everything had worked. At this point I got the following message:

"This Windows Live ID has been reserved for future use."

Okay, so my thought was I probably need to create a LiveID with my new account but when I tried to do this I received this message:

“This e-mail address is part of a reserved domain such as live.com, hotmail.com, or msn.com. Please enter a different e-mail address.”

Hmmm catch-22. Seems a few people have run into this and it might be old news but here’s the solution:

1. Delete the account un the Live Admin Center. It gives you warnings about the mailbox being irrecoverable if you delete it, but of course there’s nothing in it yet

2. Wait for a period of time (about 10-15 minutes in my case as I found when I tried to continue directly)

3. Create a LiveID with the email address

4. Re-create the mailbox in the Admin Center

It might have been a problem with my account (a second brand new email address i.e. tester@mydomain worked perfectly the first time), or maybe I’d registered the email address as a LiveID in the dark, distant past? I’m not sure but if you experience the same thing, hope this helps.