I saw an unofficial announcement of the new Windows Live Custom Domains Beta from Dare's post.  It sounded pretty cool, and I have a domain without current mail capability, so I decided to give it a shot.

The "setup" was surprisingly painless, I merely signed up and enabled my existing passport as the "administrator", and it told me the settings I should enter for the DNS mail exchanger (MX) entry.  No problem.  It quickly verified the settings and told me everything was set up.  Fantastic!

I added a new account, and it said it was ready.  Here's where the fun begins.  If you haven't figured it out, you're basically getting hotmail accounts that are hooked up to your own domain name.  That's cool, despite the fact that it's hotmail, which still sucks in my opinion compared to GMail, despite the wider offering of calendaring and reminders.  (Tons of in your face adds and not very many features)  So, now, I have to figure out how to sign out of my current passport account and sign in with my "new" one to test it out.  I don't know if anyone has trouble with that, but it never works for me.  After logging off and logging back on, I visited hotmail and was in.

Unfortunately, Hotmail still has no "forwarding" functionality that I'm aware of, so this really isn't giving me anything useful.  Now, I can get email at a nice address, but I still have to go out of my way to go get it.  I'd rather have it forwarded to wherever I want.

Additionally, now I have 2 passports, and there seems to be no support for being logged into two passport accounts simultaneously, bringing up a whole variety of issues. And I can't get rid of the original passport because it is the "administrator" account.

In my opinion, the most likely usage scenario for this is bloggers or other content authors who have purchased their own domain, and want the "coolness" and other identity benefits of getting mail at that domain.  The current functionality doesn't seem to support that scenario in an optimal way.  I think it would be far better to be able to associate other email accounts with the same passport and be able to specify either to receive that email through hotmail or to forward to another account.  I don't want to create and manage a bunch of passports just to have a couple of extra email aliases.