

Microsoft Launches Outlook.com Premium Email Service, Costs $20 Per Year (thurrott.com) 81
Outlook.com Premium email service, which Microsoft began testing in October, is now available to all. You get the following features with this paid service, via a report: Outlook.com Premium provides a number of useful features: (1) Custom domain support for five users.
(2) Information sharing: Outlook Premium helps you easily share calendars, contacts, and documents (via OneDrive) between those five users.
(3) Ad-free inbox: Like Ad-Free Outlook.com, Outlook Premium offers no "banner ads" for a "distraction-free view of your email, photos, and documents."
(2) Information sharing: Outlook Premium helps you easily share calendars, contacts, and documents (via OneDrive) between those five users.
(3) Ad-free inbox: Like Ad-Free Outlook.com, Outlook Premium offers no "banner ads" for a "distraction-free view of your email, photos, and documents."
Hmm, marketing dept confusion on the value add? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, when you hear the Ad people talk it's "we add value by presenting opportunities for consumers" and the deep data mining is justified with "we use data to target unique ads that will delight our users"... ... and now we have a payment plan to not have ads. Admitting "yeah, ads suck so much people will pay us not to show them" Not that MS still won't datamine the crap out of you in other contexts though.
Re:Hmm, marketing dept confusion on the value add? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because they're not showing ads in your e-mail inbox doesn't necessarily mean they're not data-mining you to use information collected about you from your e-mail inbox.
For example, contents of your e-mail in gmail might be used to target ads against you outside of gmail as your browse the web. I don't use Outlook today, but the ads in Gmail are very minimal, such that, I don't notice them. However, I do notice that ads in my web browser have come from things triggered by e-mails I receive.
I'd pay to get rid of having data from my e-mails saved to target ads to me- actual ads in my e-mail provider though is almost nothing and not worth paying to get rid of. It's not the ads I mind- it's the fact they're data-mining my e-mail in the first place.
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It's not the ads I mind- it's the fact they're data-mining my e-mail in the first place.
Agree. If I were going to pay for email, I'd want strong assurances.
Corporations now have such a hard-on for data-mining, they'll likely do it even if it doesn't actually generate revenue.
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In that case, I suspect this service is for the rubes, then... or does the ad injection happen in the emails themselves, out of reach of AdBlock/uBlock/etc?
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I suspect this service is for the rubes
This is great news, time to migrate from my current beloved, trusted email service yahoo to outlook.
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Just because they're not showing ads in your e-mail inbox doesn't necessarily mean they're not data-mining you to use information collected about you from your e-mail inbox.
I'm scared to think what MS has mined out of my hotmail account. The one I use for (you know) non-professional email conversations.
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I'd pay to get rid of having data from my e-mails saved to target ads to me- actual ads in my e-mail provider though is almost nothing and not worth paying to get rid of. It's not the ads I mind- it's the fact they're data-mining my e-mail in the first place.
You "would" pay? Then do so!
With Office365 for Business their advertised rate is $5/month for one user. You can use your own domain. It's their business product, so there's no data mining. What I and my family have found nice is that, being standard Exchange, it's well supported by most mail apps.
(I'm a bit confused about the price though... I'm paying $8/month/user for "Exchange Online Plan 2" to get completed unlimited email storage, and I'm paying $4/month/user for "Exchange Online Plan 1" for my parents
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Great! Thanks for the update- that is very useful to know!
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Why?
One is an expert at domains while the other is an expert at emails. I've never had trouble with dealing with separate domain and web/email providers. The setup is so simple that someone with little domain knowledge can set it up.
Too late (Score:5, Interesting)
I waited for quite a while for this service to become available.
I really wanted the multi-domain support without having to buy a business edition O365 plan which would then come with all the business versions of the apps.
Instead, I found fastmail.com and I haven't looked back. I am super pleased with those guys and I am glad I didn't wait.
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Been using Rackspace.com.
$1 per POP3/IMAP and their support is very responsible. I can actually vouch for them as we have 50+ email boxes with them and we've only had 1 hours of down time in 7 years.
We are however looking at migrating towards Exchange. I really don't want to but the hosted exchange servers are far too expensive for our user count.
Easy answer (Score:2)
Why not just run your own?...Then you have fine-grained control of everything to make it exactly what your business needs.
Indeed, I find the same to be true with the gasoline I refine myself, or the cotton I grow to form into my own clothing. So much simpler! And I get any octane I like, though people look at me funny when I mention my sweaters are 98 octane.
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Seems like a solution using a problem.
No real sysadmin is going to use a $20 a year account just to (maybe) rely on onedrive. You're either rolling your own exchange server or renting email from google or office 365.
TBH, in a small enough operation you can skip even that... a simple Postfix/Dovecot/Spamassassin rig with IMAP enabled will do the job just as quickly, and for far less money (the entire thing can be parked on an old cast-off *nix server with a decent amount of disk space, or on a small AWS instance if that's how your small business rolls.)
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Unless email's just for fun at your business, you'd probably want a little more reliability than that.
>> small AWS instance
By the time you consider that, you're probably >$20/month for <=5 users.
Trust me - the people setting cloud pricing know about alternative solutions, and $250/year for reliable small-business email is essentially market price right now.
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Re:First post (Score:4, Informative)
Seems like a solution using a problem.
No real sysadmin is going to use a $20 a year account just to (maybe) rely on onedrive. You're either rolling your own exchange server or renting email from google or office 365.
It's 1 domain, $20/year, 5 users. It's not for sysadmins at a small company. It's for a family. Or a small time single consultant. Or a tiny non-profit.
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Or a nerd. I have my own domain because I like having it. There are two addresses on the domain. It's my permanent contact address. I'm grandfathered in on the free Google Apps plan, but if that ever ends, I'd pay MS $20 a year to do my mail hosting for sure.
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No mention of how much storage space. Doesn't clarify if you have to pay the fee for each mailbox on a custom domain or if that yearly fee gives you all 5 mailboxes. No real information anywhere.
I did read in the comments below the article that if you buy a domain through them, Microsoft owns it and you can not transfer it out.
Egg, bacon and ... (Score:2)
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... or use an e-mail client (desktop, mobile) instead of their web based mail client? I'm not sure if Outlook supports plain old IMAP and SMTP, though.
Back when I used Gmail for a brief period, that's what I did.
Now I pay for e-mail through a service provider... though I'm working towards putting together an e-mail cluster of my own.
Lol, ummmm, NO (Score:2)
"(1) Custom domain support for five users.
(2) Information sharing: Outlook Premium helps you easily share calendars, contacts, and documents (via OneDrive) between those five users.
(3) Ad-free inbox: Like Ad-Free Outlook.com, Outlook Premium offers no "banner ads" for a "distraction-free view of your email, photos, and documents."
1) Lol, custom domain support, whoop-de-fuckin'-do. Just get your own domain and have as many users as you want.
2) "Information sharing", Oh yeah, I'll bet there'll be "information
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Oh, you mean run my own server?
Add to your list, firewall protection, spam filtering, filtering out file extensions in attachments, checking for relays ...
Just "No."
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No scanning? (Score:3)
And for this price, ... (Score:2)
But my email is already snooped on (Score:1)
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Oh shut up. If you don't want it dont pay for it but don't whine like a fucking bitch about it. FFS
US-only (Score:3)
Would've been nice to add that little tidbit in the summary.
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Before getting all excited, from TFA: "The bad news? It’s still offered only to users in the United States."
Would've been nice to add that little tidbit in the summary.
If only they could have run it on some sort of cloud platform hosted in multiple countries.....
I pass! (Score:1)
Outlook.com has the worst mobile UI (Score:2)
I have seen a lot of mobile UIs in my time, but it is the worst. The interface fails to load half the time. The time that it does, it takes multiple taps to get it to do something. Multiselect is an exercise in futility, you'll get about 3 selected, then on the next select, it'll drop the previous ones, meaning you never select more than one reliably.
And they want to charge for it?
Ad Free! (Score:2)
Just like when I use it in Thunderbird.
So, ads are a distraction, then? (Score:2)
Ads are something that detracts from the user experience, and we think you'll pay $20/year to be ad-free (at least on Outlook.com).
ffs (Score:1)
Be ad-free by getting back to POP3 and a local... (Score:2)
Be ad-free by getting back to POP3 and a local email client. The ads are there, because web mail is used. I pull 180+ mailboxes into Outlook on my Windows box and have been doing so without ads just fine for a long time. The domain is mine with email services provided along with its hosting. My iPhone is configured to use a few of these so that I have mail on the go, and I could add more. For those that must have the option of web mail as a client, use IMAP instead so that the mail remains on the serve