Items tagged with Outlook.com
Ever since Edward Snowden leaked details on how the government had forced various IT companies to disclose information (or secured their willing cooperation), companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have been desperate to regain their users' trust. Six months ago, Microsoft announced that it would reengineer its products and services to provide a much higher level of security -- today, the company revealed that its reached an important milestone in that process. As of now, Outlook.com uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to provide end-to-end encryption for inbound and outbound email -- assuming that the provider on the other end also uses TLS. The TLS standard has been in the news fairly...
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After three days of outages, Microsoft finally fully restored access to its Outlook.com email service. Without diminishing the egregious nature of such a lengthy outage for many users, Microsoft has been forthcoming about what went wrong and outlined the steps it’s taking to avoid the same problem cropping up in the future. “This incident was a result of a failure in a caching service that interfaces with devices using Exchange ActiveSync, including most smart phones,” reads a service status report. “The failure caused these devices to receive an error and continuously try to connect to our service. This resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly,...
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In this episode of "Microsoft Knows Best," Outlook.com is phasing out support for multiple email addresses. Going back to the Hotmail days, linked accounts were introduced in 2006, and Microsoft fully acknowledges there are several legitimate reasons for using multiple email addresses, such as not wanting to hand out your primary email identity to businesses that may then flood it with junk mail or sell it to third-parties. So, what gives? "Well, a lot of things have changed since we introduced linked accounts. Most importantly, your email address is also often how you sign into the account that is your 'digital identity.' For example, your Microsoft account unlocks a broad array of experiences...
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One way to boost your numbers is to migrate users of an older service over to a newer one. Such was the scenario with Outlook.com, Microsoft's new webmail service that was built to scale to over a billion active customers (with the occasional hiccup). Over the past six weeks, Microsoft has been busy porting Hotmail accounts over to Outlook.com, which required the relocation of 150 petabytes of data. That process is now complete, allowing Outlook.com to boast over 400 million active accounts. "Today, we're excited to announce that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active...
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Some users of Microsoft's recently minted Outlook.com and its ancient Hotmail services were having a bear of a time accessing their email messages the last couple of days due to an outage. The service disruption also affected SkyDrive, Microsoft's online storage scheme, though a fix was doled out in a matter of hours. Hotmail and Outlook.com users started complaining about not being able to access their emails on Tuesday, March 12th, building in up frustration after several hours rolled by without a fix in sight. That's not to say Microsoft's engineers were sitting on their thumbs or asleep at the wheel like Homer Simpson in the control room of a nuclear reactor. Whatever the problem was (Edit...
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Let’s face it; your inbox is cluttered, and even if spam filters are keeping out almost of all the junk emails, there’s seemingly no end to emails that are a low priority for you. Between daily deals from coupon sites; hot sales from the stores you frequent; emails from groups you subscribe to; notifications from social media sites such Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest; and other miscellany, the emails you really want to see—your dad asking if you want to go to the game this weekend, a meeting invitation from your boss, or your friend getting back to you about the recipe you want to try this evening—can get drowned out. Those messages that you do want to receive but not...
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Microsoft Outlook has been the industry standard for desktop email for years, and although that likely isn’t changing any time soon—see the Outlook 2013 Preview as evidence—Microsoft believes that leveraging the incredible power of the cloud to provide powerful web-based email is just as if not more important. After starting from scratch, Microsoft has built Outlook.com, which offers free web-based email packed with features designed to streamline the email experience; allow users to more easily connect with contacts from social networks; use SkyDrive to share images and create, view, and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents; and enhance productivity by seamlessly integrating...
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It's time for a change, according to today's post on the Microsoft Outlook blog, and that change is a new personal email service that will eventually replace Hotmail. The Outlook.com Preview is designed to better incorporate social networking than old-school email services have done in the past. And, as you might expect, it's going to play well with Windows 8. If you have a Microsoft Account (formerly Windows Live ID), you can sign in right now and take it for a spin. If you don't, you can sign up for one (it's free) at the Outlook.com login page. The service has a cleaner interface than Hotmail and new features. Chief among the new perks is what Microsoft calls the "universal address book."...
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