Manage all your e-mail through Hotmail

In a welcome move you can now add e-mail accounts to your Windows Live Hotmail account, and read all of your mail from one place. With everything you need at your fingertips, Why bother going anywhere else?

Setting up Hotmail to take advantage of your e-mail accounts couldn't be easier. All it takes is a few clicks:

Load up home.live.com or log into your Hotmail (any Live-enabled service will do).

Look to the left of the navigation pane and select 'Add an e-mail account'.

You will be presented with two dialog boxes; E-mail address and password. Input the required information into the designated fields.

So whether you have an account with Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or one of many other providers, you can check all of your e-mail in one fell swoop.

Hit 'Next' and let Hotmail do its thing. It will take a minute or two to set up your account.

If successful you will be presented with a further screen where you can specify where you want the new e-mail delivered. 

There are two options here; into your current inbox or create a new folder to store separately.

If you choose to pop it into your inbox you can apply a colour to better distinguish all of your new messages and alert you to where they came from.

Handy tip: Adding more than four accounts? At the time of writing you are limited to four.

Once a new account is added you can easily send an e-mail from this new address by selecting it in the dropdown menu when creating a new message.