Outlook.com breaks the 25 million active user mark, releases an Android | Hacker News Reader

Outlook.com breaks the 25 million active user mark, releases an Android

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36 pointsarturogarrido33 comments

Jumped on my own name email address on Outlook when they relaunched the new look and I have to save I love it. I find it much easier on the eyes and in the UX department than Gmail.

Gmail to me feels stale and over encumbered by labels and buttons and checkboxes.

There are some thing about Outlook that do annoy me, mainly how it doesn't want to save my password in the login form and automatically fill it in. It's ridiculous. I also dislike having to type my email address instead of just the username. `foo@outlook.com` it gets tiring.

I don't regret switching! :)

the sweep feature in particular is very well done.

Among other things, I like push email. Gmail doesn't do that.

Bookmarklet to force firefox to remember any password, even on pages that have autocomplete=off (like outlook.com)

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/forms.html#remember_...

Drag that to your bookmarks toolbar and run it once before submitting the form on the website you want to remember passwords on.

The reason Outlook.com has 25 million users is that it's harvesting/transplanting users from the it's Hotmail user base.

I'd use the term "bullying" in this respect.

Are they just urging people to switch, or do they actually move them over without the user having a say in it?

Urging - regularly. I use a hotmail account for trash signups and they are pushing constantly.

I don't remember ever getting an e-mail, and if I did, hotmail still has a delete button.

Out of curiosity, how are they pushing? I just signed up for a new Hotmail account, and the only upsell I'm getting consistently is a small "Free Upgrade" link in the bottom left (which actually appears to be structured as an add, which is kind of strange).

By the way, you can opt into "Outlook.com" without getting a new email address. You can keep your same address but get the new Outlook.com experience, which is quite frankly much improved.

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

I signed up for a 'comedy' outlook account without realising they would deactivate and migrate my hotmail account entirely.

I was probably dumb for not reading the small print but they're definitely pushing people over and inflating their 'growth' because of it.

You could have kept your old address and still gotten the "Outlook.com experience". You could also have created an alias and left your existing email address as your login. You chose to rename your account, which makes the new address your login, and also makes your previous address an alias (which means you'll still get mail sent to it, but it's no longer your login).

I'm not clear why you'd expect that your new address would be completely separate from your existing account. That would be a terrible experience for most people. "Sure, I'll upgrade to Outlook. Oh wait, now I have two separate accounts, with two separate inboxes, and two separate logins. I guess I'll just never use the new one, because it's a pain."

If you are unhappy with the outlook.com address you've chosen, you can rename your account again. (This link is harder to find than it should be, especially if you want an Outlook.com address.)

https://account.live.com/ChangeId?fl=nd

If you do want a completely new account, you should create one without "upgrading". Just log out (or open an InPrivate/Incognito window) and go to Outlook.com. From there you can sign up for an account that will indeed be completely separate from your other.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee

I was more pointing out that the stats were being inflated by the moving of users from another service onto this one. I was not complaining about my own mistake.

However that being said, I thank you for the advice and have indeed now changed my address to something more acceptable.

With regard to what I expected to happen, I expected an additional 'from' email to be added and an option regarding new mail to be given. I didn't expect my various logins to change. Still, all resolved now. Thank you.

Glad I could help. I can understand wanting to just have a new "from" address. Outlook/Hotmail does support that. That's the alias concept (https://account.live.com/AddAssocId?fl=nd). I think the Outlook upgrade flow might offer that as well, but I'm not sure.

One big missing feature is the ability to rename to an existing alias. That would have fixed your issue as well. I believe that this is "kind of" supported, but I've never tried it. You can delete an alias and then immediately rename to that address. No one else will be able to grab it for 6 months, but if you've added a bunch of aliases, you might be in a "no new alias" window, and I think in that case your rename action might fail (or might not; I'm not sure and unwilling to break my account trying. :)).

the android app is outsourced to a company and it's awful.

Yeah, looks like it.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.outlook.Z7

They could at least include screenshots of the inbox. Not that interested in the composing and welcome screens.

It looks more like a joke... this can't be real.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.outlook.Z7

I thought it was a scam and nearly reported it before finding out it was legit.

It's that bad.

I registered way back, and subscribed to two mailing lists to try it out. That exposed a major flaw to me: Conversation views are in reverse time order. Which is kinda okay if you're talking to an actual person and might just want to look up what you previously said, basically an extended version of (goshawful) top-quoting. It does break apart if you're trying to get into a new mailing list conversation where you have to read through 10 posts.

If it had an option of reversing that, it wouldn't actually be that bad. Not as good as gmail, but better than all the desktop-clones like gmx.com or yahoo.

the outlook.com web app is nice, but the Android app is complete junk,, looks like something they just put together in few days.. makes me wonder why they even bother making it in the first place...

I wonder how many of the 25 million are people squatting on their family names and such. That's what I've done. I login once a week or so to make sure the account stays active.

How frequently must one log in (to modern email clients) in order to not be deactivated? Once every 5 months and 30 days?

I think it's 90 days for hotmail/outlook, which is pretty short compared to gmail, which I think is a year. But, that would also explain why it's a lot easier to get the email name you want on hotmail/outlook.

If you're using a multi-account IM client(Adium/Pidign/etc') you can add the account there, and it will stay alive as long as you continue to use the client.

Honestly, any product is going to count someone who logs in once a week as active, no matter why they do it.

Does the address book sync work in this version, or is it still broken like in their Hotmail app?

By "active" they must mean "actively collecting spam".

I have a very active hotmail account and it's actually amazing at filtering out spam.

What a coincidence, I registered yesterday. Must have been me ;)

But seriously: WTF. It sucks so badly, that badly needs to be redefined. OK, it's much better then msn/live mail was... and redefining badly is perhaps a bit too harsh. But it still sucks.

Did anybody see what it looks like? It is very clean. Boring even. And in chrome the screen is not even 100% height in the mail overview. (And sending mail from google mail ended up in junk, but that may have been bad luck).

I do like the new stuff MS is trying though. I really hope their metro stuff on desktop and mobile will cause some movement in the 'almost the same for many years now'-interfaces from other manufacturers. In that case I might benefit from their experiments as well.

I am downvoting you because you said 5 times that it's bad, and you have provided 1 single arguable example of why it is so.

I agree, I do not deserve points for just saying how I 'feel' about outlook.

Thats no fundamental reason. Just a feeling. It depends on how you look at it: this feeling, just not liking it, might others have as well.

I think Outlook.com has plenty of real usability issues. For instance, it immediately forgets which messages you had checkboxed if you just jump to the next page and come back. And the whole From/Subject index view can display very little information compared to Gmail. You don't get the same "I am in control" feeling. And whatever you click on Outlook.com, there's always a noticeable delay before anything happens.

Personally I think that if you launch a new webmail service, you should first make it at least as functional, usable and solid as Gmail. Otherwise what's the point.

> Did anybody see what it looks like? It is very clean. Boring even.

I'm sorry that you don't like clean interfaces? The modern Microsoft interface aesthetic is minimal by design. It's not something that everyone loves.

> And in chrome the screen is not even 100% height in the mail overview.

That's because you don't have anything in your mailbox. It will expand as you get more mail. Gmail has the same behavior. You just happen to have a bunch of stuff sitting in your Gmail inbox.

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