

Outlook.com breaks the 25 million active user mark, releases an Android - arturogarrido
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2012/11/27/outlook-com-breaks-the-25-million-active-user-mark-releases-and-android-app-and-new-themes

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sergiotapia
Jumped on my own name email address on Outlook when they relaunched the new
look and I have to save I love it. I find it much easier on the eyes and in
the UX department than Gmail.

Gmail to me feels stale and over encumbered by labels and buttons and
checkboxes.

There are some thing about Outlook that do annoy me, mainly how it doesn't
want to save my password in the login form and automatically fill it in. It's
ridiculous. I also dislike having to type my email address instead of just the
username. `foo@outlook.com` it gets tiring.

I don't regret switching! :)

~~~
gman99
Bookmarklet to force firefox to remember any password, even on pages that have
autocomplete=off (like outlook.com)

[https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/forms.html#remember_...](https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/forms.html#remember_password)

Drag that to your bookmarks toolbar and run it once before submitting the form
on the website you want to remember passwords on.

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xradionut
The reason Outlook.com has 25 million users is that it's
harvesting/transplanting users from the it's Hotmail user base.

~~~
meaty
I'd use the term "bullying" in this respect.

~~~
Zirro
Are they just urging people to switch, or do they actually move them over
without the user having a say in it?

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meaty
Urging - regularly. I use a hotmail account for trash signups and they are
pushing constantly.

~~~
dpark
Out of curiosity, how are they pushing? I just signed up for a new Hotmail
account, and the only upsell I'm getting consistently is a small "Free
Upgrade" link in the bottom left (which actually appears to be structured as
an add, which is kind of strange).

By the way, you can opt into "Outlook.com" without getting a new email
address. You can keep your same address but get the new Outlook.com
experience, which is quite frankly much improved.

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

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ayi
the android app is outsourced to a company and it's awful.

~~~
angry-hacker
It looks more like a joke... this can't be real.

<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.outlook.Z7>

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mhd
I registered way back, and subscribed to two mailing lists to try it out. That
exposed a major flaw to me: Conversation views are in reverse time order.
Which is _kinda_ okay if you're talking to an actual person and might just
want to look up what you previously said, basically an extended version of
(goshawful) top-quoting. It does break apart if you're trying to get into a
new mailing list conversation where you have to read through 10 posts.

If it had an option of reversing that, it wouldn't actually be that bad. Not
as good as gmail, but better than all the desktop-clones like gmx.com or
yahoo.

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hdra
the outlook.com web app is nice, but the Android app is complete junk,, looks
like something they just put together in few days.. makes me wonder why they
even bother making it in the first place...

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forgotAgain
I wonder how many of the 25 million are people squatting on their family names
and such. That's what I've done. I login once a week or so to make sure the
account stays active.

~~~
personlurking
How frequently must one log in (to modern email clients) in order to not be
deactivated? Once every 5 months and 30 days?

~~~
jxi
I think it's 90 days for hotmail/outlook, which is pretty short compared to
gmail, which I think is a year. But, that would also explain why it's a lot
easier to get the email name you want on hotmail/outlook.

~~~
SoapSeller
If you're using a multi-account IM client(Adium/Pidign/etc') you can add the
account there, and it will stay alive as long as you continue to use the
client.

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nodata
Does the address book sync work in this version, or is it still broken like in
their Hotmail app?

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Toshio
By "active" they must mean "actively collecting spam".

~~~
pav3l
I have a very active hotmail account and it's actually amazing at filtering
out spam.

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BozeWolf
What a coincidence, I registered yesterday. Must have been me ;)

But seriously: WTF. It sucks so badly, that badly needs to be redefined. OK,
it's much better then msn/live mail was... and redefining badly is perhaps a
bit too harsh. But it still sucks.

Did anybody see what it looks like? It is very clean. Boring even. And in
chrome the screen is not even 100% height in the mail overview. (And sending
mail from google mail ended up in junk, but that may have been bad luck).

I do like the new stuff MS is trying though. I really hope their metro stuff
on desktop and mobile will cause some movement in the 'almost the same for
many years now'-interfaces from other manufacturers. In that case I might
benefit from their experiments as well.

~~~
riffraff
I am downvoting you because you said 5 times that it's bad, and you have
provided 1 single arguable example of why it is so.

~~~
BozeWolf
I agree, I do not deserve points for just saying how I 'feel' about outlook.

Thats no fundamental reason. Just a feeling. It depends on how you look at it:
this feeling, just not liking it, might others have as well.

~~~
kennu
I think Outlook.com has plenty of real usability issues. For instance, it
immediately forgets which messages you had checkboxed if you just jump to the
next page and come back. And the whole From/Subject index view can display
very little information compared to Gmail. You don't get the same "I am in
control" feeling. And whatever you click on Outlook.com, there's always a
noticeable delay before anything happens.

Personally I think that if you launch a new webmail service, you should first
make it at least as functional, usable and solid as Gmail. Otherwise what's
the point.

