Sign in to Hotmail as a guest
Here is a quick overview of the options you have when you are at a friend's house, for example, and you want to check your emails and sign in to Hotmail as a guest. The problem of course, is that the person who invited you may also be a Hotmail user, in which case you would have to sign them out of their Windows Live account to check your own profile! But depending on the length of your stay, your hosts' security settings and operating system, you will find several options that let you check Hotmail!
Login to Hotmail as a guest, without disrupting others
Here are a few choices you have, depending on your situation:
- The easiest, and most obvious choice to check your Hotmail account without logging out anyone else, is to use the private browsing feature that most modern web browsers offer: it allows you to check your email messages (or any other browsing activity), without leaving traces of your visit, and in our case, you can sign in to your account on a guest computer. Follow these steps to anonymously login to your Hotmail account.
- If your hosts are nice, and you are staying as guest long enough, they may well allow you to create your own profile on their computer, which would allow you to check your emails and other online profiles and activities like Facebook, without interfering with their activities!
- Finally, the best case scenario is when you are the guest at a household who owns a computer, but where no-one is currently a Windows Live Hotmail user! In that case, you will have no problems, since you will not need to logout anyone of their email account, and they will not accidentally end up in your Hotmail inbox, reading your emails when trying to check their own Hotmail account! But with nearly half-a-billion Hotmail users in the world, chances of this scenario happening are unfortunately quite slim!
Either way, the safest way to sign in to your Hotmail account as a guest is to avoid checking the checkboxes that allow Windows Live to remember your user name (Windows Live ID, or email address) and password: in other words, do not make the web browser automatically sign in to Hotmail!
Hotmail Privacy Tip: when you sign in to Hotmail as a guest, never forget to completely sign out and confirm that you are logged out. This avoids anyone accessing your email messages or profile settings accidentally (or on purpose!)
New Hotmail, MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail & Live email are all referring to the same free webmail service offered by Microsoft and Windows Live Team (works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X). Microsoft Corporation, Apple, and other companies own the copyright or trademark to these and other terms mentioned.