Ask HN: MS Outlook login without an extra email address
3 points - yesterday at 8:14 PM
I have an email address which is like 16 years old. Microsoft changed their auth process, i gave them my phone number, fingerprint, and solved like 4+ captcha puzzles (lol), and now it asks for a secondary email address too confirm. I cannot get any further and cannot read my email now! There is some irony in needing another email address to access my email address, and it makes me want to leave as soon as possible. Would be helpful if I can access my email I am using for more than a decade. Do more people experienced this, and maybe found a way to login without an extra email address?
al_borland
yesterday at 8:56 PM
I have run into far too many email services that require an email service to set up email. It always made me wonder how someone is supposed to get their first address... or how someone can live with one address, which should be a perfectly normal thing.
I signed up for Fastmail today and to my pleasant surprise, they didn't ask me for another email address. Though they did ask for my phone number as an anti-abuse auth.
That said, Fastmail is paid, so if you need a dummy email just to check a box that you have one in Outlook, something like Proton, Yahoo, or Gmail is probably better... assuming they let you get through the setup without providing another email address.
If you happen to have an Apple account, you can enable iCloud email on that as a secondary address as well.
narevent
yesterday at 9:16 PM
"It always made me wonder how someone is supposed to get their first address... or how someone can live with one address, which should be a perfectly normal thing."
Yeah this was my thought also, although i understand the backup option for recovery, but thats already present with a phone verification.
I actually do have other email addresses, i'm just surprised by the irony of it, especially that there is no workaround, for a tech company powerful like microsoft, making just viewing personal email via their service so unpleasant..
al_borland
yesterday at 11:01 PM
I think part of the issue is that our email address has largely become our identity, much like our phone number has. If someone gets into your email, they can effectively take over your whole life. This has caused the security around it to go up, but ironically, this leads to more account lockouts, which then locks the user out of a lot of their life with no way to recover.
It's a bad system all the way around. I've been debating a few moves and I've been kicking the can down the road, because I'm worried about some of these sharp edges.
mtmail
yesterday at 9:23 PM
Here's an example where somebody can no longer login because they haven't set a secondary email address. I'd set a secondary email address just to be safe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50037004