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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.
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.
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
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
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.
... 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
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.