Friday, March 21, 2008

Removing a Windows Live Account from WM6 Messaging

This took me a bit of Googling to figure this out; I thought I would post this here in order to pass this information along. It's a lot harder to do this than it should be!

The reason I wanted to add my Windows Live account was to have a way of backing up my contacts which wasn't dependent on Outlook. I had great luck with this, the contact synchronization worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the mail synchronization always failed. It would download my folder structure but then would never synch any of the email, either sending or receiving. Additionally, my battery started draining much quicker once I configured my Windows Live account. When Windows Live was running, it also seemed to want to keep my phone's data connection constantly open. I think this was occurring because of the Windows Live Messenger, although I couldn't prove this conclusively.

The steps to remove the account from WM6 Messaging are not at all obvious. For all other POP3 or IMAP mail accounts, you open Messaging and select Menu | Options. You then get your stylus out and tap and hold on the account you want to delete until the context menu comes up. You select Delete, confirm that you want to do this, and it's gone. Very easy and straightforward.

This is not the case with a Windows Live account. If you follow the steps listed above, the context menu appears, but the Delete option is grayed out. At this point, I poked around all of the Windows Live options but couldn't find anything that indicated you could remove the account.

I found the answer on the second page of this Windows Mobile forum post. Here's what you need to do:

  1. Open up Windows Live in Start | Programs
  2. From Menu, select Options, then Switch Accounts. Confirm that yes, you do want to switch accounts. After doing this, all of the email account information will be removed from Messaging.
  3. When the EULA displays, select Reject.

Easy, right?

As a caveat: The Sprint (HTC) Touch with Windows Mobile 6 is hands down the best phone I have ever owned. This is really the first thing that really annoyed me since I started using the phone.

1 comment:

billy said...

Thanks, but this didn't work for me... what did work was removing the "Windows Live" key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Inbox\Svc. (I found the info here: http://pocketpcmauritius.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-to-remove-hotmail-account-and.html)