How do I delete a contact in Hotmail?

Depending on how you’re entering in the email address, many email services
let you just right-click on the suggested item and there’ll be an option to
delete.

Not so with Hotmail.

On top of that, there’s some added confusion.

You may be seeing more than just your contact list.

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Deleting a Contact

When viewing your inbox, click the Contacts link in the lower left:

Your Hotmail contacts are actually your “Windows Live Contacts,” which are the contacts that are available to and created by all of the Windows Live services that you might use:

To delete a contact, just click the checkbox next to the one you want to delete, and click Delete:

You’ll need to confirm that you really want to delete the contact:

Click OK and the contact’s gone.

“Contacts” not in your Contacts list

If you commonly begin typing the first few letters of an email address and you see “suggestions” being made, what you’re looking at is Hotmail’s auto-complete.

Hotmail offers up suggestions of email addresses and names that begin with the characters that you’ve typed so far.

If the email address is in your contacts list, you can delete it both from Contacts and from this list of suggestions by using the instructions above.

However, you’ll occasionally find suggestions that aren’t in your Contacts.

Here’s an example that I ran across while researching a previous article on this topic:

That’s not in my contacts, and thus, it’s not a contact that I can delete.

As it turns out, it’s a Windows Live Messenger invitation.

That article that I was researching is How do I get rid of these questionable entries in my Hotmail auto-complete? It has the instructions to remove these and block future ones from appearing.

Windows Live is more than Hotmail

One important take-away here is that when you sign up for a Hotmail account, you’re getting a lot more than just Hotmail.

Hotmail is branded as “Windows Live Hotmail” because it’s part of the Windows Live family of services. That means that when you create a Windows Live Hotmail account, you’ve actually created a Windows Live account that can be used for all Windows Live services.

Put more concretely, what most people don’t realize is that by signing up for a Windows Live Hotmail email account, they’ve also signed up for Windows Live Messenger instant messaging account – because they’re the same account.

And they share one common set of contacts; “Windows Live Contacts” to be specific.

Add someone to your instant messenger list in Windows Live Messenger and you’ve added them as a contact; a contact that will show up in Windows Live Hotmail as well.