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Using Outlook.com with your own Web Domain

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98 pointsarihant34 comments

Pretty much everyone I know who is using the free Google Apps is using it just for webmail and according to this outlook.com allows you to have 500 users per domain instead of free Google App's 10 users.

While I'm still grandfathered in to the old Google Apps free tier on a couple of domains, I'm going to try switching one of them over to outlook.com and see how it goes.

I never would have bothered paying attention to this if Google hadn't killed their free tier, hopefully whatever gain they get from that was worth the potential loss of users (even though they offer it for free, they still benefit from my data and showing me ads in mail, now it is likely they won't).

Google got rid of the free Google Apps today, except for those grandfathered in.

thats pretty much what he said.

As kayoone said, I already acknowledged that in the post you're responding to.

While I think it is at least somewhat nice that Google did grandfather in existing users, a big part of the appeal for free Google Apps for me is that whenever I had a domain that needed mail but not too much and not worth paying for (because the domain was not a profit maker) I could spin up a free Google Apps easily and know was I was getting because I was used to it. Also I could recommend doing the same to friends in the same situation.

Without that ability in the future, I feel it is in my best interest to start migrating off the platform even on my existing domains, especially when this alternate option (which I was previously unaware of) is available.

I don't pretend to know what Google's cost and benefits were with regard to free Google Apps, or whether this move makes sense in the large, but I can tell you that in my specific case they've begun pushing me away from their email infrastructure altogether with it.

I been using Outlook.com / Live Domain Services for a while now. Here are some issues I face

- Catch-all address is not supported.

- If you want to connect one email to multiple accounts, (for easy switching between your domain emails) you have a limit of 5 accounts linked together.

- No IMAP support, but Push works well. Add as an exchange account to iPhone and sync all the folders.

- Only Office365 ( Premium service ) has good MS support, the free service has a community based support at Microsoft Answers which is well, pathetic.

- At times ( quite a few times ) it forgets, you have created a new email and has 100s of mail in the your Inbox as you been using it from months and it gives you the first-time setup page. Don't panic, just log out,clear cache and try again. Everything would be fine and back to normal.

One suggestion, if you switch and create an email account and for some reason want to reconfigure everything again. Make sure you delete all the email addresses you created. If you do not do that, after reconfiguring live services won't let your create that email for like forever ( 3 months wait time till its gets cleared from the system )Yes, even if its your verified domain.

some one please explain what IMAP support means.. every time someone mentions outlook they mention lack of IMAP as its disadvantage. and also why it is such an important feature?

It means you can sync your email to an email client (like thunderbird or outlook). If you read an email on your desktop, it will sync that action to the webmail account.

Having IMAP is worth it...

EAS is supported on Outlook.com, so I believe connecting it to desktop Outlook should work fine. Thunderbird, not so much.

IMAP - Internet Message Access Protocol.

Consider IMAP as being the cloud email service. All the emails are pulled on your device/web/client whenever you want or whenever they arrive. Its like the standard protocol for all possible clients/interfaces to pull the mails for you.

Soon after IMAP was created, Microsoft introduced its own protocol called MAPI ( Messaging Application Programming Interface ) which practically is IMAP for hotmail/outlook. MAPI is now commonly known as Exchange as it runs on their Exchange Servers.

Practically all email services ( apart from outlook/hotmail) support IMAP now as its accepted almost everywhere and used on all web/device/clients.

As Exchange/MAPI are Microsoft products, only companies that have their own Exchange mail servers or use Windows Live Hotmail/Outlook servers will be able to use MAPI/Exchange.

Exchange/MAPI on the other hand always seems to support push mail. IMAP IDLE exists but many clients do not provide support for it, for example Mail.app for iOS. And if you use Gmail on a few devices via IMAP, you easily run into the annoying 'too many simultaneous connections' issue.

(I use IMAP nevertheless since Exchange/MAPI has some annoying issues on iOS if used with Gmail and Exchange/MAP is not supported by Mail.app on OS X.)

TL;DR Using IMAP is like syncing each account. If it's 'Read' in one account it's marked as 'Read' in all, same goes for delete or send or whatever.

The more basic approach 'POP' downloads a copy, no syncing.

This look interesting. I was one of the rare few who paid for hotmail premium ($20/mo it used to be) - back in the day.

For sentiment sake, (largely), I held my original email address for so long (~14 years) and I didn't want to let it go.

It's always a surprise to have people you haven't heard from in 5+ years contact you!

it seems like a great alternative but what kills it for me is a lack of IMAP support.

Yeah that is surprising. I would have just assumed they offered that if you hadn't mentioned it.

they offer MS exhange support instead. which is really nice. esp. also due to push support.

I'm currently testing this, took me a second to figure out the setting for android/exchange

user: \user@domain.com password: password server: m.hotmail.com

i think it's just exchange 'activesync' so it'll work on your iphone but not on your desktop mail (mac mail for me)

Be careful, I had my domain with outlook.com's predecessor, then when moving to a hosted exchange option made the mistake of trying to close the account instead of simply moving my domain records and leaving be.

I can never, ever, use me@mydomain.com as a Microsoft account ever again.

I faced that issue when reconfiguring it on outlook and it is very annoying. The only thing we can do is wait 3 months ( they flush off the account, as they say ) or just make sure you delete all accounts first and then close that account if you hadn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890741

One distinct advantage: Outlook is supported for Push mail on iOS mail client.

So is Google Apps since 2009: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com.au/2009/09/google-sync-now-...

This is not the same. Google Sync has nothing to do with built in iOS mail client - which only supports 15 min fetch from Gmail.

Correction: It actually is. Gmail is accessible via Exchange on iOS which supports push.

Yes, it is. [1]

[1]: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

… with some issues though:

https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

An issue not mentioned is the possibility to show selected labels only. With IMAP, only the selected labels are shown in Mail.app.

Do you know BTW if using Exchange with Mail.app on iOS resolves the problem that each Gmail messages is shown in at least two folders/under at least two labels (for example 'All Mail' and 'Sent')?

Also new outlook.com support multiple accounts/mails very well

Edit: Basically you can create as many accounts as you want then link them together and you get n * 7gb skdrive space

I didn't know you could use your own domain with Outlook.com. That's very nice and it's an interesting option.

Not specific to these instructions but because of (potential) caching, when you need to verify dns it normally pays to use a third party server (or two) such as these instead of your local machine:

http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html

http://www.kloth.net/services/dig.php

http://www.zonecut.net/dns/

It's much much cheaper to just purchase a VPS or ATOM Dedi and install iRedMail and SOGo. You don't get Docs of course but 80% of the customer's I know don't use Docs, only email and Calendar.

I can't say I will ever switch over to Outlook though since Microsoft is notorious for charging for everything sooner or later and ruining a lot of things. They botched up Skype now that they have it also.

After giving it a shot for a few weeks I can say that MS's spam filter just can't compete with Google.

Been doing this for the last 5 months and has worked very well. Like others have said, push is great.

If only I could use GChat with Outlook.com, I would switch in a heartbeat.

GChat is pretty much just plain jane XMPP. You can host it for free with any of the online services w/ your own domain.

until it's becomes a paid service too...

Microsoft has Office 365 as the business paid service. I don't really see them switching Live Domains to a paid service anytime soon, except for a Hotmail Plus-like experience as an addon (no ads, etc).

They're definitely pushing the new Office 365 subscriptions with Office 2013, so I don't think they'll be too keen to offer a competitor to O365 anytime soon since they're pushing it so much.

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