Why do I have separate Outlook and Hotmail Accounts?

[Windows Central Question]

I have a Lumia 950 on the latest production build. When I set up the phone, I provided credentials for a single Microsoft account. But two accounts were actually created, one called "Outlook" and one called "Hotmail".

The "Outlook" account offers options to sync Calendar, Contacts, and Email. The "Hotmail" account offers only the option to sync Email. By default, all of these are set to "on".

I do not get duplicate emails, but I have lots of problems syncing. Frequently, the process seems to hang and I sometimes get an error saying that certain messages couldn't be synced.

I've tried changing the "Sync Email" options (Outlook On/Hotmail Off and Outlook Off/Hotmail On) but that has not seemed to help. (It's also common for these account options to be unavailable for a long time because the phone claims the account is still syncing - even though it just synced a few minutes before).

I've tried changing the option for email download frequency (I tried "As items arrive", "every 30 minutes" and "Daily"). I also reduced the "Download email from" option down to "7 days". None of these things fixes the issue.

This problem has persisted across two 950s so I don't think it's a hardware issue.

Any suggestions?

 

[DrNitun]

Hello,

I am not sure exactly what to config here but I am definitely sure it is a simple settings thing. Maybe along the lines of having Outlook.com having your hotmail account as an inbox? That way, on the phone, all you would really need to setup is only your Outlook alias/account.

If you have a MS store nearby, just have them fix this for you simply and quickly.

 

[SlideWRX]

Bumping because I had the same problem. the account where you can only sync email is the 'main' one. I somehow had two accounts created from the same email. I didn't pay it much attention other than trying to save contacts & calendar stuff to one versus the other. Yesterday however it did the oddest thing. In the middle of a text conversation with my wife, it switched contacts. I had two separate listings in messaging with my wifes name, with two halves of the conversation. Crazy! after reading through some of the W8 phone threads, I just renamed the main account (that syncs by default - you can't change most settings) to what I wanted and deleted the other. Since everything was syncing to the same account, I should have everything, right? Here's hoping...

here's a quote from another thread (http://forums.windowscentral.com/windows-phone-8/224753-outlook-com-hotmail-contacts-shown-linked.html):

The other complication is the mess they've made with naming conventions, accounts, etc. across Hotmail, Live, Outlook.com, XBox, Skype, etc. Hotmail is now Outlook.com (and Outlook.com has nothing to do with Outlook from Office 365, which itself is different than desktop Outlook tied to Exchange).

Now that they unified Windows into one OS across everything, they need to deal with all the different account systems they have going.