Slashdot Mirror
Telstra Bigpond To Use Outlook.com As Email Handler
New submitter sidevans writes "It looks like Australia's largest ISP is working closely with Microsoft and will soon be letting them handle customers emails using Outlook.com. The setup guide is available here. An interesting move, considering the National Broadband Network rollout is coming. What's in the future for other ISPs and how they handle email in Australia? Are the days of ISPs providing in-house email servers coming to an end?"
Does anybody know what backend outlook.com is using? It's the same as hotmail?
Why do ISPs still provide email?
There are lots of free and pay for email servers available. I say reduce my bill $1/year and get rid of it.
millions Microsoft paid them?
My rule of thumb is that if you call yourself an ISP and can't manage e-mail without outside help, you don't get to have your domain name in my e-mail address.
Log in or piss off.
> Are the days of ISPs providing in-house
> email servers coming to an end?
Considering that AT&T farmed out their email to Yahoo about five years ago, I would say the answer is probably "yes." Or at least "yes, in some cases."
I know of very few people who use their ISP-supplied email addresses. One reason I quit using mine is because I've had 10 ISPs in the last 15 years. Out of all the things an ISP can provide me, an email account is probably the least useful.
Whenever I get an email with a bunch of recipients, I look at all the addresses and I'd say maybe 1/4 are using email from an ISP. (And of those, probably half are AOL.) The rest are mostly split between gmail, yahoo, and hotmail.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Are the days of ISPs providing in-house email servers coming to an end?
In my experience, ISPs provide at best, a second class email service and I would be surprised if it was anything more than a necessary evil for them.
Microsoft, Google et al can provide a product that is fully integrated across all devices and easily accessed around the world. How many valuable ISP customers are using ISP provided email anyway?
From TFA "Find out about updating Windows# Phone, iPhone*, Android^, Nokia, BlackBerry+ or other phones"
There's your answer. One more way to push Windows Phone. I'm surprised they didn't simply push Android to the 'other phones' category.
some web sites / other places don't let you use free email address
Telstra have traditionally worked closely with Microsoft, and are resellers of their products. This is just business as usual for them.
On one hand you have a massive, monopolistic company that has held back competition in the industry (but whose influence is now waning), while the other company is Microsoft. It seems like an obvious match.
What I don't understand is why there is any reference to the NBN in the summary?
That's not strictly true... I've come across a few places that won't let you use any from a list of free providers that are often used for spam (Gmail, Yahoo, etc), but it's by no means an exhaustive list compared to the number of free email providers out there.
Really having your email on somebody else's server is just a bad way of doing things.
It's doens't give you the same legal protection as having your stuff in your home. It makes you beholden to somebody else for your email address. And it slows down delivery considerably.
Best to just run your own server.
In other news, the U.S. Postal Service is partnering up with local garbage dumps in an effort to reduce its costs, clear landfill space and bring you fresher junk mail than ever before. While some people will grumble about the security and public health implications of re-delivering old junk mail that has already been thrown out, others have pointed out that they weren't using the service anyway.
"Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Australia's worst ISP teaming up with the world's worst email service. Gold!"
You've not even used outlook.com, have you?
Outlook.com still doesn't support IMAP, which is why I'll stick to my own email hosting solution.
>Configure BigPond email with Microsoft Outlook 2007
>NEW BIGPOND® EMAIL, COMING IN 2013/14
Why does Telstra assume everybody will still be using a 7-year-old email client in 2014?
Telstra started migrating Bigpuddle customers to Live late last year.
No IMAP == crap.
The infidels already migrated me ...
Thanks Telstra !!!
Back in the 90 I got tired of my email changing everytime my ISP got bought out so I got hotmail, thats been my primary email for about 15 years now. I have many email accounts that Ive been forced to sign up for (yahoo, several Gmail, comcast, etc) that I never use.
Lots of ISPs have been doing something similar all over the world, for a very simple reason:
The profit margin in providing internet service is miniscule. And people expect more and more from email.
15 years ago, you'd get POP3 and a mailbox quota of maybe 20MB. If you were lucky, you might also get some sort of web-based email, but it was usually pretty primitive by modern standards.
Today, people expect a sophisticated web-based service that they can also use with their smartphone and there's still quite a few people who want to use something like Outlook (and so need IMAP). Yet the profit margin per-customer per-month after you've met the costs in providing a DSL line and backhaul to the Internet is something stupid like £1. They're being expected to setup, support and maintain something comparable with GMail for £1/user/month. Well, less than £1/user/month because you still need to make some profit.
Even a Google Apps for Business account is £2.75 per user per month.
No wonder they want to stop providing email, you simply can't do a good job unless you specialise in it.
Microsoft has no monopoly in this area, they're not acting aggressively or anticompetitively, and they're not doing a crappy job. They're also no more likely to be hacked than the competition. And Google isn't exactly saintly anymore. Sure, you can expect that there will be some security breach in the future; there always is in basically every system, and the competition isn't going to be any more immune.
Ok, sure, you don't want to give money to Microsoft. But this is a WEB SERVICE. It's not the same as installing Windows on your PC and letting Microsoft take control of what you can compute. It's email, and it does a good job for most people. If you need to meet some other requirements, you can set up your own email server. But that's you, not Joe User who wants to send photos to grandma.
Anyhow, so this ISP probably evaluated multiple solutions, including Google and Microsoft, and decided that Microsoft was going to give them the best value (them, not necessarily their customers). Sucks for Google, good for Telstra, basically indifferent for most of their users.
This is why in all linux books the sendmail.cfg is in the back 26 pages of the books!
echo "hello world bay-bee"
Here's my belief.
SMTP/POP3 server is a pain in the ass to run correctly. (yeah I know there's those smart ass'es who tell you the blacklists are simple we've been doing if for years, yet they still can't secure YOUR server, since their method is different.)
ISP's for whatever fucked up reason may or may not be able to deal with it. (I've personally seen incompetence as a reason)
If they can't they should outsource it.
Some real isp's like sonic.net provide email with white/black/greylist (also newsgroups)
mod up, ehy, as my morning fuzzy shit roll continues.
"and if you call telstra, we'll just say go to hell sir" and probably blame MCI...
Sing it loudly now, with that shrimp on the barby voice!
No EAS == crap.
And Gmail doesn;t even support full IMAP specification, it cannot do push e-mail for example.
" these dual C-64's sitting next to me, they're the back bone of telstra.net "
Oh why do I say this? Connect to telstra.net:80 failed
It's two am on a weekday,
I'm beginning to feel a cold sweat;
There's sounds of MRAP'S a surrounding me,
It's the backbone of DHS.gov
I said "Come. let's send the world a 30 round clip,
I don't really care where it goes;
If you cross my home's threshold with that unconstitutional shit
after that it's a motherfucking crap shoot.
Da, da da, de de da,
Da da, de de da, da da.
Da, da da, de de da,
Da da, de de da, da da.
Now Obama our beloved black president
Has a gun stance far from love...
But he's a quick with a frown, when the 3D printers skip town
While he's shoving obama care down.
Da, da da, de de da,
Da da, de de da, da da.
Da, da da, de de da,
Da da, de de da, da da.
Dum DUm Dumb Dumb Dum bum
...except Outlook.com bites donkey c@ck.
"Microsoft has no monopoly in this area, they're not acting aggressively or anticompetitively, and they're not doing a crappy job"
You have an interesting definition for "not doing a crappy job". Must be that new math the kids keep talking about.
Microsoft has a long and continuing history of fudging with standard mail protocols "just enough" to make to make using Outlook a constant pain in the backside for anyone NOT using an MS Outlook client. Sure, the Outlook server 'could' be completely standard and play nice with the rest of the world, but that's not how it's configured out of the box and MS admins are discouraged from making it play nice with anything but other Outlook clients.
This effectively locks not only the actual users, but also the people who receive emails from Outlook clients to into using the native MS Outlook client themselves.
Just another monopoly, acting aggressively and anti-competitively to push a crappy product.
What's the link between the NBN and ISP's providing email services? Apart from ISP's will use the NBN to deliver service to customers and customers use email.
They always have, chucky. Any anyway, all the ISP email systems I have seen recently use google.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They've been using hotmail for years, this isn't news, just an upgrade.
About half of my familly's ISP's use a 'cloud' based email solution. This has been so for about 10 years.
Amazing, only 13 months late. I love slashdot.
``If you've connected, updated or added mailboxes after 10 February 2012, you'll have access to Outlook.com straight away.''
Australia holds a lot of useful information. Now, China will hold it as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Bigpond to use Outlook.com as email handler and still, in the year 2013, you can't use IMAP for your email.
It's bad enough that up until now they've been providing nothing but a POP account (except with the switch to Windows Live Mail last year) but to move to another provider that doesn't support IMAP is just crazy.
Sure, you can use EAS on your mobile device, but what about on your desktop. Oh, you mean there are other email clients than Outlook?
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne