MobilityLeaks: outlook.com

Today on MobilityLeaks, the email list discusses yesterday’s “preview” of outlook.com!

David K: HOLY FARK
http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/31/technology/hotmail-outlook-overhaul/index.htm?hpt=hp_t3
and by the way- ****ing brilliant. Get rid of the name and the stigma (yeah Zune you too) and reinvent it and get a clean slate.

James S: I just went to Outlook.com and it gave me the preview right away. I like the look so far.

Marti M: kk
I got my name @outlook!

David K: But if I login I can’t add an Outlook.com email address…it only lets me add hotmail or live.
Gotta go get accounts for my kids before the names are gone
OK 4 accounts opened…cost me $.50 to verify my son before I realized not to ever do that again. Take that extended family – I got the addies first!

David K: http://www.zdnet.com/windows-phone-users-do-not-rename-your-email-to-outlook-com-7000001906/
Don’t do the ‘upgrade’ thing if you use WP – same ****…MS never remembers their base. I can’t ‘update’ so I have more addresses now…not consolidated ones. Hopefully they let me consolidate them in the future.

Murani L: I grabbed my name at outlook.com and will just forward my new emails to my live.com account.

James S: This has always baffled me as to why they won’t let you change the live id associated with your Windows Phone.

Doug Sm: so can you have both live or outlook accounts? I just registered my outlook account but I do not think I have a live.com email. I used my gmail account for my live sign in, which I don’t really want to do anymore.
I wish we could pay to get the ads removed… 🙁

David K: Uhm…On Google now and yeah – those are ads right there…
Wonder if this carries over: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/hotmail/hotmail-plus

Jim S: Screw it. Getting too old for this ****. Now I will have an: AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo account. Wonder if CompuServe is still up and running. Tired of chasing after Microsoft’s naming whims.

Marti M: When you’re at Outlook.com, in the mail, look all the way to the right. You’ll see your name and avatar. To the left of that is the settings “cog”. Click on that. Select More mail settings. Under the first category, near the bottom of it, you should see “Create a outlook alias.”

Ram U: Well, this exactly looks like the Mail App on Win 8. Of course Metrofied.
Also make sure if you have Windows Phone please, please make sure that you are not changing your old email addy to outlook.com. This makes your WP totally useless, you have to reset your device thus losing all of your personal information.

James S: Yep no ads for me on the main outlook.com page. 🙂
Now I know why, I am redirecting the MS ad server call to my local computer. Geek for the win!

David K: Wow Gizmodo want to weigh in on this? http://gizmodo.com/5930358
They love it…crazy how things change

Evan P: The attached is enough to make me import my gmail…

 

 

Jeremy B: Except I tried to import my gmail and they gmail blocked it because they thought it was an intruder even though the IP address said Hotmail.com as the name. Think google is getting wise and not allowing any more imports today. 🙂

Jim S: Ok, what the hell. I reserved my name. But I have Hotmail Plus and it just renewed in June. Don’t want to lose that by forwarding mail from @hotmail to @outlook.

Ram U: I do have one Hotmail Plus account and my MSN account is tied to it. I have a few live.com accounts including my secondary and family. If Microsoft extends the Hotmail Plus for all those accounts, that would be great. I am not fancied about outlook.com, I like live.com domain name some how better over outlook. Live says whether you’re online or not for communications, but Outlook says, your outlook for that moment. Live sounds from outside and outlook sounds from “I”. I think Microsoft should continue live.com, hotmail.com, passport.com, msn.com in addition to outlook.com forever. They haven’t said that they are going to discount those, but they may once most of them migrate to outlook, IMO.

Evan P: Finally! I figured out how to check outlook mail from a mail client when your live ID is a gmail account. Just checked my name@outlook.com alias and {an alternate} alias. It’s all good. Hit the WP and Thunderbird

James S: Whoever would like to block ads here are the steps:
1. Click the shortcut “Windows + E” to open up Windows Explorer
2. Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
3. Open up the “hosts” file running as admin in the text file editor of your choice.
4. Add the following line to the end of the file 127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com
5. Save the file
6. Restart Live messenger and/or close out the browser that is running outlook.com
Enjoy no ads!

David K: CNN MSNBC and Fox News all share one thing in common right now – front page articles talking (praising actually) the new outlook.com rollout and features. That’s news in and of itself.

2 Bunny: Dang. I’ll have to check it out, but it looks like more of their flaky HTML5 web based crap. Their recent update got it a little better, but still feels like a cheap Dollar Store toy to use instead of a solid flash based site. I think this will make things really confusing between “Outlook.com” and real Outlook.

Evan P: I use Windows 7 and 8 RP at home and XP/7/OS X and god hate it Debian at the Job. Since about 2010, I really haven’t seen a thing that Microsoft has embraced that was “flaky” on the software side of the house, especially nothing in web development. We can argue that point, but, to just give it an eyeball test and already have that conclusion is BS. Furthermore, who cares if it makes things really confusing between the web app and the desktop app? That’s the whole idea. That it works on all OSs, sans app. This principle IS EXACTLY what Google looks to achieve with Chrome Books and the backbone to their cloud computing strategy. I think PC World has it best: “at the touch of a button, Chrome lets you make a desktop, Start menu, or QuickLaunch shortcut to any Web page or Web application, blurring the line between what’s online and what’s inside your PC”
The simple fact of the matter is that most folk on this feed are pro-Microsoft, but I’m not going to just sit back and watch the lazy mud slinging continue unimpeded, when it comes to MS (and to a degree, android).
At the very least, it’s impressive to see in the course of 20 years; two tech giants completely reinvent themselves to become successful. Apple did it when they finally realized that the best thing that they can do for themselves is be the best sales & marketing tech company in Silicon Valley. Microsoft finally felt the sting of their contemporaries in the computing space and decided to not just rest on their laurels, symbols and relics but to get up off their ass and actually make something. Now they’re taking all those “somethings” that they have made and are tying it together in a cohesive package. It’s ****ing awesome to see (same goes to Ford).

David K: You guys add your FaceBook accounts? Go into ‘People” in Outlook.com and add the accounts. *** is solid…you can IM and post from the site. I can see it going further (pull in more info) but it’s pretty ****ing epic.

Murani L: Nice tip. Will do.

Evan P: It’s auto added if you linked your FB and Twitter accounts to your live IDs. Something folks had to do during the Mango Preview to get the IMs working.

2 Bunny: Good writings. I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot, I was actually more trying to “throw mud” at the pain that is HTML5. MS hasn’t screwed everything up either – for example, they did manage to improve the Xbox 360 and learn from every mistake that Sony made. Ironically enough, I liked the hardware of the PlayStation 3 before they changed it and now it continually disappoints me.
I just try to balance everything out on a practical scale and keep us all on a field where we can understand the whole market better, not start a “pointing fingers war”. 🙂

David K: https://mobile.twitter.com/Outlook/status/230427048919851008

Jim S: I got three of those.

David K: Five for me;) got an alias at the end. So rare that any addy is available…hard to shy away from

Marti M: I got one, but I might go fetch a second…

Jim S: Has anyone hard reset their WPs and started from scratch? In other words, changed your address from @hotmail to @outlook? Or are you going to forward Hotmail/Live to the Outlook account, and maintain Hotmail/Live for logins?
Dont think I am ready to change everything: WP, Zune, XBox. But I wouldn’t mind using the Outlook address for my mail. Decisions, decisions.

Evan P: creating aliases. I’m not killing my account.

Murani L: Not hard resetting. I’m waiting for the WP8 newbie to start using it and even then might not use it as primary unless Microsoft can figure out how to make it work on the backend without major headaches.

Jim S: So using an alias with an @outlook.com within your existing hotmail/live account? Any advantage over forwarding everything to a new @outlook.com account. And maintaining the old account simply for logins etc. Send and receive from the new outlook.com account.
May have to think about this for a few days. Don’t want to overreact.
I agree. Not really concerned about continuing to use a hotmail account. Hey, I still have AOL account. But if hotmail is approaching EOL, might as well get started.

Aaron P: Anyway to just merge the accounts? I think Microsoft should have rolled something out like that.

Jim S: Yeah. With WP, that would have been nice.

Marti M: +1
I’m going to wait on that, I think.

Jim S: Yep. Mom always said to sleep on a problem if things were not clear. I will wait till I get aWP8 device before switching over from @hotmail to @outlook. Not sure how the Surface RT will feel about that but my guess is it won’t be a big deal.
I could forward messages from @hotmail to @outlook, but don’t want to deal with a contact list/calendar on two different account that won’t be able to sync with each other.