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Microsoft Trials Outlook Premium For $4 Per Month, With No Ads and Custom Domains (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Microsoft is testing a premium version of Outlook.com that removes the ads and supports custom domains for email addresses. According to Brad Sams at Thurrott.com, Outlook Premium is free for one year and then costs $3.99 per month during the trial phase, though it's only available by invite for now. The service appears to combine two features that Microsoft offers or has offered in the past. The first is an ad-free version of Outlook, which is already available today as a $20 per year upgrade. The second is custom domains, which allow users to enjoy Outlook.com's features but with a personalized email address.
Outlook Premium could also slightly undercut Google's Apps for Work plans, which support custom domains for $5 per user per month. It also offers a middle ground between ad-free Outlook and a full Office 365 subscription. While Outlook Premium may be tempting for a select few, general users may be hard-pressed to pay anything for Outlook, let alone $4 per month.
I always figured we should be able to make systems exposed and unstable for free.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Fastmail is a far better option. Fastmail is run by guys who truly know what they are doing. I've been a satisfied user for over 10 years. Yes, it costs money. Yes, it's completely worth the small amount you pay to have the best paid email on the planet. You can use their domains or use one of your own with the right plan. I'm not affiliated with Fastmail, just an extremely happy customer.
Fastmail
Seriously? Who actually sees ads at this point? If you aren't running an Adblocker you are just setting yourself up for malware and worse. I haven't seen an online ad in 10 years.
It isn't ironic at all. Drug dealers do the same thing: first hit is free. It works.
Not to stand up for Microsoft, but I don't remember Office ever being free. Maybe some of the old DOS versions of Word/Excel, etc? But I do remember paying for a copy of Office '97 on CD-ROM(!)
I know a lot of the cheap clones like Packard Bell, et. al. would come with a copy of "Microsoft Works" (chuckle), which were incompatible file-format wise from Office.
Instead of creating new content and apps, the legacy desktop software vendors of the world -- Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, etc. -- continue to subscription-wall their suites in order to try to move users into constantly paying for stuff, forever, rather than forcing them to upgrade every few years. Unfortunately (for them), the younger, more tech-savvy Facebook generation isn't going to buy into their rent-seeking model -- they'll just find another "free" option and use that until it's gone or crapified to the point of being useless (heck, a lot of Adobe's products are mostly there already). The desktop software world will probably look a lot different in another decade, for the first time since the birth of the Internet.
It doesnt require an email address at outlook.com at all - my Windows 10 account uses an MS Account that has a Gmail address.
Creating a new account on Windows 10 REQUIRES an e-mail address at Outlook.com
Utter nonsense. You can create a local account on Windows 10 that is NOT tied to an email address or Microsoft account. Admittedly, it's not easy to find, but it it available during the initial user setup.
Creating a new account on Windows 10 REQUIRES an e-mail address at Outlook.com
Actually you can still add a local user account during or after setup.
See also this and this.
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Outlook.com does not scan your emails to offer up contextual ads like what GMail and Yahoo does. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-U... Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft on Outlook.com
I have had the $5/mo google apps for a long time and am in the process of moving my stuff over to MS. I use MS Office online way more than google docs so it makes sense for me. Plus I think that outlook.com is a cleaner interface than Gmail.
I am currently doing an old fashioned forward to my Outlook.com mailbox from gmail.
Only problem is, in order to use my custom domains on MS, I need to use an O365 business plan which would come with OneDrive for Business (Groove) and Skype for Business (Lync) instead of the home user versions.
I don't want to use the business editions for that reason.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Creating a new account on Windows 10 REQUIRES an e-mail address at Outlook.com
So is this part of Microsoft's devious plan to squeeze all Win10 users for $4/month?
No it doesn't just because you don't know that you can use a local account please don't go spreading misinformation. It makes you look uninformed.
Or I could just keep using Thunderbird with no ads for free like I've been doing since it was born?
You're forgetting the option of using Free Software. No subscriptions, no spyware, I couldn't got back to using software which I have no control.
My windows 10 account isn't linked to any email address. It's entirely local.
Perhaps you're a little retarded and can't follow the on-screen instructions when adding users?
... I no longer trust Microsoft enough to give them any more money.
You must be young. In the 90s, Office was very expensive, but new computers often had "free" copies of Word bundled with or preinstalled on the computer. Microsoft kept this up until they got most of Word Perfect's market share. Then they started bundling Microsoft Works, making Works less compatible with Word, and charging for Word and Office. After they had the entire word processing market they stopped bundling any office-type software with their computers and made you buy it.
Using Outlook.com for email is a bad idea. So much legitimate email is never delivered, and you won't know what you're missing. It doesn't go to spam or junk or anything. They just delete email and don't warn you. You might as well set your primary MX record to 127.0.0.1 because email with outlook is about that useful.
Morphing Software
https://www.utdallas.edu/~lieb...
You must mean the instructions that offer *only* an email address to be entered so that MS keeps my machine tethered? How is that a "local" account?
Here are your instructions. From the User Accounts control panel, choose Manage Other Accounts, then Add a user-account, then Sign in without a Microsoft account (not recommended), and confirm this with the Local Account button. Now type in the name and password; no email required.
That wasn't too hard, was it? I take it you don't have the OS installed to test it. The only difference between Windows 10 and Windows 8 is that Win8 doesn't have the hyphen on the Add a user account link and it doesn't have the (not recommended) wording.
What if my machine has no internet connection? I can't use Windows 10 then??
Even with a Microsoft account, you can still login without internet access. I don't have a Microsoft account on any of my systems to test it, but I have done it on other people's systems when I had to fix their WiFi access.
They've been running email servers since 1989, they write books about running email systems, they teach admins how to do email, they sponsor and take part in Linux events and the boss himself answers questions on Reddit. The system even shows you whether your recipient's mail server is able to receive your message via encrypted channels, right in the recipient box.
The symbol in the comment subject is supposed to be a Euro symbol (€), it looks like UTF-8 is broken when commenting via mobile browser.