How to Stop Hotmail and Outlook Birthday Reminders

Birthday reminders are some of the dumbest and most annoying emails you will get from Outlook and Hotmail. And for most people they come automatically without having ever added them to your calender. Typically, for most people these will have all been added at some stage via Facebook and other social media apps that you email address is connected too. The good news is that you can disable these email birthday reminders in just a few steps, though as always, the option has been burried in a stupid location...

Why You Are Seeing Birthday Reminders in you Email?

Outlook and Hotmail if you are still using it includes a dedicated birthday calendar that pulls information from your contacts. Whenever a birthday is detected or added, the system creates a reminder. Which over time, often leads to a large number of notifications you couldn't care less about. So if your account is connected to other services or imported contact lists, birthdays from random people as well as friends will quite often appear without you manually adding them.

How to Stop Hotmail and Outlook Birthday Email Reminders

• Open your preferred web browser and go to the Outlook website.
• Sign in using your email address and password.
• Make sure you are logged into the correct account where the reminders are appearing.
• Once you are in your inbox, find the calendar icon. This is usually found on the top/middle left of the screen.

• Click it to switch from your email view to your calendar.
• In the calendar interface, look for an option labeled Add calendar or Manage calendars.
• Clicking this will open a sidebar with different calendar options that you can customize.
• In the sidebar, find the section labeled Birthdays. This is the feature responsible for generating the reminders you are seeing.
• Select the Birthdays option and look for a setting that allows you to turn the birthday calendar on or off.
• Toggle this setting to off. This action disables the birthday calendar and stops the associated reminders.
• For some dumb reasons the Turn on birthday calendar always has a tick in it. It just highlights or doesn't highlight when on.. It's quite confusing.

• After turning off the setting, refresh the page to make sure the change has been applied.

Will this Re-enable at some stage?

While it probably won't re-enable itself, it's almost impossible tell since this is a Microsoft service and Microsoft does all sorts of random dumb stuff all of the time. For example if you disable something on Windows, a new update will turn that feature back on... As a result you should expect something similar to happen to birthday reminders in Outlook and Hotmail.