What is the full list of Hotmail/Windows Live mail domains?

Question

I've changed our website's contacts import mechanism to use the Windows Live Contacts API for importing contacts from Hotmail. Now I'd like to be able to detect when an email a user gives us is a hotmail email address so I can route them through this path.

Currently I'm leaning towards just using a regex to match something like /^(msn|live|hotmail).[^.]+$/ for the mail domain, but I'm worried that Microsoft might not necessarily own all of those. Is there a canonical list of the Live and Hotmail domains that Microsoft controls?

Answer 1

The short answer is you can't, because of the Windows Live Custom Domains feature.

https://domains.live.com/manage/

Anyone can register to use Hotmail to host their email for any domain.

However, you could certainly highlight that option for users known to have Hotmail accounts.

Additionally, you probably don't want to restrict users from pulling back contacts from accounts that aren't their primary email address; a Facebook, for example, allows you to grab your Hotmail contacts even when you're using another account as your primary email address.

Answer 2

Looks like the current list of official Microsoft domains is:

hotmail.co.il
hotmail.co.jp
hotmail.com
hotmail.com.ar
hotmail.com.br
hotmail.com.tr
hotmail.co.th
hotmail.co.uk
hotmail.de
hotmail.es
hotmail.fr
hotmail.it
hotmail.jp
hotmail.se
live.at
live.be
live.ca
live.cl
live.cn
live.co.kr
live.com
live.com.ar
live.com.au
live.com.mx
live.com.my
live.com.sg
live.co.za
live.de
live.dk
live.fr
live.hk
live.ie
live.in
live.it
live.jp
live.nl
live.no
live.ru
live.se
msnhotmail.com