Microsoft Hotmail Forwarding Fails

I have been with Microsoft Hotmail for more than 10 years; according to Wikipedia, Hotmail was initially released in July, 1996, and my account was created in Sep, 1999. It was the best free public email you could have at that age. It was all good to me at the beginning until its competitors rise up.

Like I reviewed the difference of free email service with your own domain provided by Microsoft and Google HERE, I think Gmail is much better than Hotmail service; so I decided to move my personal email from Hotmail to Gmail. Although my current contacts and previous emails are stored in my Hotmail account. Google does think for you; if you browse your Gmail setting, there is an email importer that you could use:

If you want, you could let Google know you would like to keep importing emails from your previous account for another 30 days so that the near future emails that are going to your previous emails account (in my case, Hotmail) will be automatically imported into your Gmail account. What if you pass the 30 days of grace?

Normally email systems will support auto forwarding to another email account so that you could transfer all future incoming emails to your new email box. Well, Microsoft Hotmail has it too, but obviously Microsoft doesn’t want to lose their users. And that’s why Hotmail Forwarding fails.

Whenever I tried to forward emails from my MSN account to Gmail account; all I got was “You’re only able to forward mail to a custom domain or an e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, or live.com. Please try again.“

So that means I can’t forward any emails out to free public email service like Yahoo and Gmail. I also tried it with Apple’s MobileMe account but still no luck.

But wait, it says “custom domain” should be fine; then I tried email from my domain, rockia.com. You know what? It STILL didn’t work. After a couple seconds, I realized that by saying “custom domain“, Microsoft really means custom domains that using their service I introduced earlier ago HERE.

I really don’t understand why Microsoft will lock themselves up, trying to keep their users. Yet I must say it really doesn’t work; initially I was hopping to continue using my MSN account as my secondary email for email list signup and my Gamil as my primary email for my friends. Now I guess it will be a wiser idea to just leave Hotmail and not coming back.