Microsoft made a lot of changes to their live.com and hotmail.com emails since most of us created them. Whether you want to change your name because you got married, you are opening a business, or you just want to look cool, finding how to update that name is a chore and a half.
Try these steps. They worked for me after many hours of frustration.
1. Make sure your name is how you want it in your profile.
2. Download Skype, which is hard attached to the Microsoft profile and change your name in there. This may take an hour or two before it registers across accounts. (Just uninstall after if you don’t want it).
3. Change the name in the billing settings. These can be found by clicking on your display pic, then view account > payment & billing > billing info.
4. Did you used to use messenger? You might be having a hang up now with your display name clinging to your email. You’ll have to back door into messenger to get in. First, install messenger off of filehippo or oldversion.com. The latest version was 16.4.3528. Then, to get into it, go to messenger geek and get the messenger patch called messenger reviver. We got it here. Please, please, please make sure you scan files when you download them because I have no control over what those sites put up, but we scanned them when we did it and found them safe. It doesn’t mean that’s forever.
5. Last but not least, create a new mail message. Under … it gives the option to “show from.” Click it. Then in the from drop down arrow, click the drop down and click on the email address.
6. Give it at least an hour to update. Feel free to pause or eliminate any of the steps you like. We did all of these things and after about an hour, it did work. It could have been one or all of them which completed the end of the frustrating head-pounding loop of this process.