It’s used below your mobile number and profile name and almost kept only for compatibility with legacy accounts. The Skype ID name is kind of a thing of the past, I say kind of because you can no longer choose what it is, but it still appears in your profile. And once created, you still cannot change your Skype name. If you decide to sign up for a new account and just invite your contacts again, what once was your choice now gets decided by Microsoft, who seem to think that being identified as “ live: 8e1d093b1a149dde” is going to give you a happy feeling. The ProblemĪs I, and many other people on the Skype Help forum have found: you cannot change your Skype username.

But now, as our needs have become more practical, we might have had a change in our life circumstances, want to give business contacts our Skype name for negotiating a new contract or collaborate on a professional project and an account name that aligns with all of your current social accounts would be useful. Practically, we invested heaps of time building our address books and building histories of our messaging conversations or video calling on the platform. Let’s be honest, there was a time when many of us had cool “hacker” aliases – part of that train of thought that you could reinvent yourself online, become free of the restrictions of RL and morph into a mysterious, gender-neutral digital intelligence. Many of us have grown through different stages and changes in the way we use our online communications and wish to present ourselves. So, here’s a use case that I have encountered recently, the problem it caused and the way I wrangled the system to get the result that I wanted out of it, a new account with the username that I wanted (is that too much to ask ?). Registering for a new Skype account has changed and become far less user friendly since Microsoft’s acquisition of the software in 2011.

Change skype email address