Once in awhile (although it’s rare) we will write about a Microsoft product, and now appears to be one of those times.
Right off the bat, let’s just say that making Outlook Live’s Email Forwarding Settings persistent/permanent is one of the more infuriating issues we’ve come across. To put this in context, a friend of mine wanted to use the web version of Outlook, and then have Outlook Live forward all incoming email to another email address. This is not an unreasonable request. The problem is that due to Outlook’s waning popularity, it seems that the software is not well maintained, and that means that some features are not working as expected.
The Problem: Outlook Email Forwarding Settings are not Permanent
Even after checking off “Enable Forwarding” and saving the settings in Outlook Live‘s Email Forwarding section, the email forwarding setting does save or remain active. Basically, it reverts back to an unchecked state. Numerous attempts at re-saving the settings, logging in and out and re-doing those settings have not resulting in any sort of success.
Indeed this problem has been reported countless times and has been described in detail here on Microsoft’s Community Answers page on the subject. Sadly, Microsoft doesn’t offer any kind of solution because unfortunately, Outlook Live‘s email forwarding appears to be broken in 2022.
A Potential Solution to Outlook’s Email Forwarding Issue?
We found one setting that actually worked for us in fixing the Outlook Live Email Forwarding issue, albeit temporarily. This was by adding an alias email to our Outlook account. Long story short, after adding the destination email as an email alias to our Outlook Live account, the email forwarding settings remained in place and were functional. Yes, even testing sending an email to our Outlook account resulted in the test email getting forwarded on to the destination account.Sadly, after an undetermined amount of time, the forwarding setting once again became inactive.
Steps to add an email alias to your Outlook Live account
If you want to try this yourself, you can add an email alias to your Outlook account by following the below steps
1. Click on Microsoft Account
2. Click on the Your Info tab and then in the Account Info section, click on Edit account info:
Now you will be in the “Manage how you sign in to Microsoft” page and you will be able to set an alternate email address, presumably the one that you wish to forward to.
Like we said, it may or may not work for you as it worked for us, but temporarily.
An Extreme Solution to Outlook Live’s Email Forwarding Issue
Sadly, while we wait for Microsoft to fix Outlook Live’s email forwarding issue, there are only 2 real solutions remaining:
1. Don’t use Outlook Live – Seriously, I hate suggesting this option but if you need email forwarding to an alternate email, use that one in the first place.
2. Use Thunderbird – You can use Thunderbird (or another email client) to access your Outlook/Hotmail account and you can turn on Thunderbird’s email forwarding feature and it works like a charm every time. The only caveat is that you will need to leave Thunderbird open or else it will have no way of forwarding incoming email.
Found another solution? Let us know what it is!