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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft really doesn't care about branding: once I logged in to my new @outlook.com Inbox using Outlook.com, I was redirected to live.com where I had a single message pre-sent to me from the "Hotmail Team" welcoming me to Microsoft Live Hotmail.

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Outlook's url seems to be on the live.com domain... confusing at best. Let's make a comparison of url's from the "home" view:

New Outlook (wtf): https://bay002.mail.live.com/default.aspx

Gmail (better, could be cleaner): https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox

Did you miss that it is still a preview?

Does the URL really matter that much? I agree it's not unimportant, but I don't think it's a big deal. The program itself is much more important

It matters from a security perspective. A bad or inconsistent URL, especially a hostname that isn't instantly recognizable, makes phishing easier.

hm... that's interesting because I got an email subjected "Welcome to the Outlook.com preview"

http://i.imgur.com/UNhny.png

are you sure you're using the new outlook.com account and not an old hotmail/live one? if you have a password manager with autologin you might have gotten signed into a wrong account

I am not even certain I know my Hotmail password: I have not logged into that account in many years, and certainly not from my iPhone (which is where I just created that account).

Yeah, verified: here is a copy/paste from the message.

    From: Hotmail Team <member_services@live.com>
    To: <saurik@outlook.com>
    Subject: Getting started with Hotmail
    Date: Tue 7/31/12 9:51 AM

Hotmail is their Email service, Outlook is their email client.

outlook.com is basically in beta. They haven't even updated the calendars. I suspect that they will continue to iron these inconsistencies as the launch date of Windows 8 approaches.

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