There are two kinds of Microsoft accounts: “Personal” and “Work or School” accounts (more information about the two types can be found in another blog post of mine). When you have both types under the same login email address you will be asked to select which account you want to use each time you sign in, which becomes very annoying very soon.

If you indeed need both accounts, the best strategy is probably to change the login email address of your Personal account and be done with it.

If you, like me, accidentally created a “Work or School” account for an email address (e.g., by logging in at the Microsoft Partner Center), there is no easy way to delete that account. I used official Microsoft support to get rid of it, and in order to spare you the hussle, I’m writing this blog post.

By creating the “Work or School” account for your email address [email protected] you implicitly created:

• An Azure Active Directory tenant for yourdomain.com
• A Shadow domain “yourdomaincom.onmicrosoft.com” for your domain which has been assigned to the tenant
• A user account inside the tenant with the login email address set to your email address

To get rid of all three things you just have to follow along:

1. Log in with the “Work or School” account at https://office.com
2. Select the “Admin” app
3. Follow the instructions to become an admin for the “yourdomain.com” domain (basically you need to create a certain TXT DNS entry for your domain)
4. Go to Users -> Active users, select your user (there should only be one entry) and click “Manage username”. Change the domain from yourdomain.com to yourdomaincom.onmicrosoft.com
5. Go to Setup -> Domains, make the shadow domain (yourdomaincom.onmicrosoft.com) the default domain and then delete the actual yourdomain.com domain

Now your “Work or School” account is no longer named “[email protected]” and if the annoying login selection dialog is all you care about you’re done. Log out of everything and voila!

However, if you’re like me, being unsettled by the still existent account, the Azure Active Directory tenant (no longer linked to yourdomain.com, but still existing) and the shadow domain yourdomaincom.onmicrosoft.com, you can follow along to get rid of them too:

1. Log in with the “Work or School” account at https://portal.azure.com – you can do so now by logging in with the email address [email protected]
2. Enter “Azure Active Directory” into the resource search box
3. Press the “Delete tenant” button

At this point Azure is going to make some checks before letting you delete the AD. If you used your “Work or School” account heavily, fulfilling all the rules can be a long and tedious process, you can find lots of instructions on Google searching for “delete active directory tenant”. Sometimes you can’t even delete things via the UI (e.g., some “Enterprise Applications”) and you have to fall back to PowerShell. If you assigned licenses to the tenant (e.g., by buying and assigning an Office 365 license to the tenant) you even need to contact Microsoft support to get rid of it.

For us “accidentally created the account” guys things are simpler though, you basically need to:

• Be the only user in this Active Directory tenant – should be the case
• You need proper access rights for the domain – not the case, but you can simply press “Get permissions to delete Azure resources” and then switch the following toggle to “Yes”:

• Afterwards you need to logout and login again so that the changes are in effect
• Then you can finally delete the tenant and thereby the Azure AD + the contained “Work or School” account

If you’ve any questions, just add a comment.