I’m guessing that like most people, you probably have multiple e-mail accounts, some of which you use more than others. Since people may send Windows Live invitations to any of your e-mail addresses (work, school, personal), it can sometimes get confusing when you want to build out your network at a single, primary Windows Live ID. Let’s walk through a few scenarios for how to deal with this.

Situation: You have a primary e-mail address you regularly use to sign into Windows Live, but you get invitations sent to another e-mail address.

1. From your invitation e-mail, click the View invitation button. This will open up a page in your web browser. 
2. If you’re not signed in to Windows Live yet, you will be prompted to sign in.  Make sure you’re signed in with your primary e-mail address, the one where you want to accept the invitation.
3. After signing in, you will be on the All Invitations page. Now, depending on whether or not the e-mail address that the invitation was sent to is also registered as a Windows Live ID, you should see one of the following two messages at the top of the page:

3a) If you received the invitation at an e-mail address that is NOT registered as a Windows Live ID, then you’ll see the following message:
To accept the invitation at your currently signed-in, primary Windows Live ID, click Move invitations. This will take all of the invitations sent to your other e-mail address, and connect them with this Windows Live ID so you can accept them here. Then, go ahead and accept the invitations you want (and ignore or block the ones you don’t want.)

Note If any of these people are in your network already, then those invitations won’t be moved (so it’s possible you won’t see any new invitations).

3b) If instead, you received the invitation at a secondary e-mail address that IS registered as a Windows Live ID, then you should see the following message:
In this case, you should sign in with your primary Windows Live ID and re-invite the people you want to add to your network from that ID. Detailed instructions for inviting people to your network are in the next section. Then, you have two choices:

• If you don’t want or need the Windows Live ID where you received the invitations, then you should simply close that Windows Live ID account by going to https://account.live.com/CloseAccount.aspx and following the instructions there. The advantage of closing it is that now any future invitations that people send to you at the closed account can easily be moved and accepted as described above.
• If you still want to keep the Windows Live ID where you received the invitation, (or if you’re just not sure you want to close it yet), that’s fine. However, there is no simple way right now to move invitations from one Windows Live ID to another, so every time someone sends you a new invitation at the secondary Windows Live ID account, you will need to re-invite them from your primary account. More details about how to invite people are in the next section.

Situation: You use multiple Windows Live IDs, but you want to accept all invitations at one primary Windows Live ID.

As I mentioned above, unfortunately there is no simple way to move invitations from one Windows Live ID to another right now.  However, you can manually re-invite people using your preferred Windows Live ID by following these steps:

1. From your invitation e-mail, click View profile (under the View invitation button).

   
2. Sign in with the Windows Live ID you wish to invite this person from.
3. On this person’s profile page, above their what’s new list, click Add to your network.
   Alternatively, if you know the person’s e-mail address, you can go to http://profile.live.com/connect/, and type in their e-mail address. (By the way, this page is also a great way to add all the people you care about at once – you can easily import and invite your friends from Facebook or LinkedIn, or select people to bulk-invite from your Windows Live contact list (your Hotmail contacts) so you can start seeing their updates in the what’s new list and keep up with what they’re doing.)

It is our goal that the invitation process should go as smoothly as possible for you. If you have any other questions relating to invitations, please leave a comment and we will try to provide you with answers here or in a future blog post.

- Richard Shih, Windows Live Program Manager