Live ID Reserved Domains

If you or your users are running into this error when trying to create Live IDs, read on.

The portion of your e-mail address that follows the @ symbol is part of a "reserved domain" such as live.com, hotmail.com, msn.com or passport.com. Please type a different e-mail address.

The HealthVault sign-in process exposes a "Create a Live ID" link for users who don't already have one.  But there are two different ways to create a Live ID that are worth knowing about:

  1. You can wrap an existing email address with a Live ID.  This is referred to as an EASI Live ID by the technical folks but you won't see this term in consumer-facing pages.  You can wrap any email address with an EASI Live ID as long as that email address isn't on a "managed domain" like hotmail.com, verizon.net or msn.com.  Addresses on these managed domains already *are* Live IDs so wrapping doesn't make sense.  If a user enters an email address on a managed domain into the account sign-up box then they will get the error message above.
  2. You can create a new Live ID from scratch.  This new Live ID will come with its own Hotmail inbox.  HealthVault used to expose this option within the sign-up flow but it added extra screens & confusion to the process so we pulled it out.  You can still direct your users to that workflow via https://signup.live.com/signup.aspx.

So if you see this error you are probably trying to do one of two things:

  1. If you are trying to turn an existing email into a Live ID then chances are that email already *is* a Live ID.  If you don't remember the password for this Live ID anymore, you can either reset it (try https://windowslivehelp.com ... the current password reset page is here) or go create a new one.
  2. If you are trying to create a new Live ID then you should go to https://signup.live.com/signup.aspx instead.