I just got a "GMail" account, and I'm glad because I'm sick of the spam in MSN Messenger, and the limited capacity.

I figured I'd bin the hotmail account altogether, e-mailed everyone with the new address, copied all my contacts to the Gmail account and e-mailed them from there too...easy.

But then I went to set up a new Messenger account...and can't seem to do it now without a Hotmail address. Have they changed this, or am I doing something wrong? Help!!!

The only way to set up an MSN Messenger account is with a hotmail account. That's how it always been. The only way you can start an account without an Hotmail account is from Windows Messenger, which comes standard with Windows XP. What you do is register from Windows and then stop using the Windows Messenger and use MSN Messenger instead.

Anyhow, why do you want to change your MSN just because you changed your email? Most people I know never use the email which they registered for their MSN.

Actually Muscati, as far as I know ... it's been possible for a while (I'm not quite sure how many months/years) to REGISTER a Messenger account with a non-Hotmail address.

However, Mimosa wants to switch his old address, to his new gmail address while still retaining the SAME Messenger account (correct me if I'm wrong here?)

Personally, I don't know how to do that ... but now a days you can easily save your 'contact list' in Messenger and activate a new account with your new non-hotmail address and than just import the list in your new account.

The other day, I went through a purging prcesses of my Trillian Pro messenger over 300 AOL/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo contacts dropped to about 90 total!!!

It's good - a little bit of spring cleaning helps speed up the log on process.

As I understood mimosa, you want to use your Gmail account as an MSN messenger login. If thats the case then its possible, you should first register your new Gmail account as a microsoft .NET Passport, you can do that by clicking here:
Passport.net (https://register.passport.net/reg.srf?lc=1033&id=486&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Epassport%2Enet%2FConsumer%2F default%2Easp%3Flc%3D1033%26lc%3D1033&sl=1)
And follow the steps till you finish the registration process, then go to your Gmail inbox and you will find an email from them, you have to follow the link in the email to finish registration.

After that you just use your Gmail username and password as any other hotmail/msn login to use msn messenger.

And you can import/export contacts easily if you have a new version of messenger.

Or you can keep it the same and if you're worried people might email you then you can set up email forwarding on your Hotmail to forward anything u receive their to your Gmail. There's a program that would set that up for you. I need to find the link to it. I'll get back to you.

Found it faster than I thought it would take:

http://www.e-eeasy.com/GetMail.aspx

Interesting article about Gmail which I found the above link in:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/18/210213&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=217&tid=95

you can use any email on msn once u register it :

follow these simple steps:

1) Go to http://www.msn.com
2) Click "Sing in .net" it's a button at TOP right corner of page.
3) Then you will see "Don't have a .NET Passport? Get one now. ", click register.
4) For e-mail address, type "YourE-mail@.....com" and then put password
5) when done, you can login msn through your mail account.

Originally posted by Muscati
Found it faster than I thought it would take:

http://www.e-eeasy.com/GetMail.aspx

Interesting article about Gmail which I found the above link in:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/18/210213&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=217&tid=95

For dealing with the old e-mail that does make life easy (first link), (and the second link has got me drooling for all the great utilities that are out and there and to come ...).

For saving/exporting/importing MSN contacts, try:

http://www.mapistore.com/Messenger/System/Review_00147_index.html

For general MSN Utils:

http://www.mess.be/

http://www.mapistore.com/Messenger/


For how Hotmail is now supposedly BLOCKING invites from Google (I doubt its completely true ...):

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/21/1150236

Passport is a great solution, my current email address is not a hotmail "hasnain@limisabd.net" but it's registered with MSN passport.:)

Life is easy now!:)