Outlook.com now has IMAP | Hacker News Reader

Outlook.com now has IMAP

blogs.office.com

145 pointsgraublau103 comments

Interestingly, it looks like they used their AMA on Reddit specifically to announce this [1].

Kind of a neat idea.

    1) Implement a long-requested feature.
    2) Do AMA on Reddit and wait for inevitable "when are we getting {feature}?"
    3) Answer with "right now!"

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1m926j/we_are_the_outl...

All of their service partners (unroll.me/context.io etc) replying with comments announcing their new support for Outlook looks like quite the bit of pre-planned marketing work.

As others on that page have noted, it is a little suspicious that /u/falconer didn't post anything for 2 years before posting the question about IMAP.

Does indeed look at like a marketing ploy. Nothing wrong with that.

ooooh, is it time to play internet detective? 'cause reddit has such a stellar history guessing the real motives of people.

with the absence of any other information at all, this user must certainly be a shill. the logic checks out.

It's not hard for me to imagine a person normally not interested in Reddit, but who feels very strongly about non-proprietary email systems.

Nearly a year ago I posted a positive comment on HN about Windows 8, and was then accused (by TWO individuals) of astroturfing.

The anti-M$ hate & paranoia that HN seems to have inherited from /. seems so beyond antiquated in this day and age.

On topic: This is great news. Congratulations to MS.

I get the same thing from geeks on Reddit regarding Windows 8. Usually a fair bit of nasty language clears up any /r/HailCorporate connotations.

It's so sad to see people who, on one hand will wax poetic on the subject of rationality and open mindedness,will turn around and join a tech bandwagon with no real reason and certainly no real knowledge.

Win8 is better than 7, even if you hate Metro. Objectively, statistically, the OS is more performant than 7.

Of course, openminded geeks never let data and stats get in the way of the anti-ms bandwagon. I'm sure they'll come around for the next windows, "because Windows is good every other release, donchaknow"!

Sorry, but after trying Windows 8 for three weeks, I had to go back to Windows 7. The experience was just too frustrating. I'll try again when Windows 8.1 comes out.

Without the use of software like Start8, I admit that the UX experience would be inferior to Win7, even including the greatly improved SSD and overall performance.

With the use of something like Start8 (or 8.1), the experience is largely identical and the extra performance and improved ui (task manager, etc) become highlights.

I get the same thing from geeks on Reddit regarding Windows 8.

Yeah, some people seem to be so blinded by hate towards Microsoft (yes, they behaved notoriously bad), that they can only judge whatever comes out of Microsoft based on that.

I like what they are doing with Windows Phone, Skydrive, Outlook.com, and web-based Office (and I am a UNIX user). But any such comment is usually with by vile reactions.

Yes, you may not like Microsoft and object to using their product because of their moral behavior (ironically, they seem to be one of the least walled-garden-ish company these days). But can we at least judge their products by their technical merit?

> I like what they are doing with Windows Phone, Skydrive, Outlook.com, and web-based Office

I don't. It's entirely possible that you confound the company-directed hate with the product-directed hate, simply because you have neither.

Which model of Windows Phone did you own? How long did you use it? How big of a SkyDrive did you own? Did you use Outlook.com or Hosted Exchange/Office 365?

For me, I'm very happy with my Lumia 928, 125 GB SkyDrive and the 400+ users I set up on Office 365 love the email system and web based Office.

The anti-M$ hate & paranoia that HN seems to have inherited from /.

Are we all to feel embarrassed? Maybe next you'll start flicking the lights?

How is someone pointing out what seems to be a really obvious setup indicative of "anti-M$ hate and paranoia"? It sounds like you're the only one who is paranoid.

Such setups are common, and in this case it does look like an employee on the group remembered an old account they had (the "it's the only thing you're missing" then a gratiutious link to marketing material). No harm in that, really, it's just a bit funny to see. Is it hateful to point out what is obvious?

I think the announcement was a setup, but not the person who asked the question. It was pretty obvious that someone was going to ask that question, you could bet on it.

The person writes this:

>Skepticism be damned, I'm actually an actual person who asked an actual question. I saw on Twitter that Outlook.com would be doing an AMA, and nobody asked the IMAP question yet, so I did. I've been a lurker on Reddit for several years.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1m926j/we_are_the_outl...

Now, it's possible it's an employee, but I wouldn't rate it as "most certainly" like you did, it was obvious that someone was going to ask this question.

Hey everyone, I'm the person who made the announcement on Reddit this morning. I can assure you that we did not go ask anyone to give us that question. But, did we know someone would? Of course. Every single blog post we've done for the last year has asked about it. If you look at our twitter account, it only took one minute yesterday after we announced the AMA session for someone to ask. We thought it would be a fun thing to do for the Reddit community.

This is one of the things I love about HN. People we talk about here actually read the articles and comments.

Feature request: like they do on Reddit with iAMAs, give posters the opportunity to verify with staff that they are who they say they are.

I love what you did! Of course it is set up, as you say, by waiting until someone asked the question. But it's refreshing compared to corporate-speak announcements that we tend to get bombarded with ;).

> posted a positive comment about Windows 8 [...] was then accused of astroturfing

> great news! Congratulations to MS.

You’re not helping your case ;)

Anyways, I've been a member of many tech fora over the years. So far, I find HN to have the best balance between defenders of Microsoft, Apple, Android, *nix, and BSD. If you know of a better forum, I’d love to hear about it.

I have a user account on the ubuntu forums that I haven't used in 6 or 7 years. Some weeks ago I posted a question about a specific software upgrade problem in the forums and realized I had never posted there. So there goes my one post for a ~9 years-old account.

Of course, as usual and as expected, I found out the answer 2 minutes after posting my question.

edit: it's 9 years-old account.

And you wrote the answer you were looking for as another post in the thread right!

I think I did !

edit: Since no one had answered I simply edited the post with the "solution" :) (seems like this got me 3 beans).

Very few things annoy me more than Googling a problem I'm having, finding a post where someone has the exact same problem and then them following up with "Nevermind, figured it out!" and not explaining the solution.

Or worse: once you get them to spill the beans, they admit it wasn't the good question and the problem wasn't related.

Of course it's a marketing ploy, that's what r/iama is. it doesn't have to be a conspiracy as well. as the microsoft guy says, "it wouldn't be an ama without an IMAP question." if falconer hadn't asked it, somebody else would have.

if you look at this ama as well as past ama's the hotmail / outlook team have done, you'll see you don't need to plant someone to ask "hey M$, why u no ship IMAP??!?!". it was the #1 question / request the team had from this audience.

> Does indeed look at like a marketing ploy. Nothing wrong with that.

Marketing via astroturfing (fake public engagement) is at best unethical, and often illegal.

>and often illegal

Really? Our government does it.

Which country is that? I know a few do. However, that falls under propaganda, rather than a dishonest commercial practice, so the law will generally be different.

Most developed countries have some laws regulating astroturfing, though implementation is often iffy, and at worst penalties are rarely that severe. Samsung was fined a few hundred thousand for it in Taiwan recently, and is under investigation in other countries, for example.

That is very interesting. For anyone who might care they have done AMAs in the past.

There might more, but it is hard to tell with the poor search implementation on reddit.com.

Seems that their original stance on IMAP was and I quote "we’ve made the decision and we’re sticking to it" [1], while a year later this was changed to "... we’ll support IMAP for Outlook sometime down the line" [2].

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xgjrw/we_are_the_team_...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ej32l/we_are_the_hotma...

I opened my pathikritbhowmick@msn.com email address in 1997. They then rebranded it to hotmail.com, then to live.com, then to windowslive.com, then back to live.com and then to outlook.com. I still sign-on to my email using my @msn.com...

Whoever succeeds Ballmer is going to have to take a long hard look at their strategic marketing team. Seriously, MS has ADD or something.

I suspect it's not ADD, it's reactionary decisions made from lack of or improperly interpreted data.

@mac.com @me.com @icloud.com

-- Sent from my MacBook Pro

The Microsoft services are becoming a very tempting alternative to Google Apps.

Mostly I'm getting sick of Google randomly dropping services I use and re-designing every 3 months.

I was looking at fastmail.fm for my mail hosting, but now I'll have to check out outlook.com as well.

Whenever I think Microsoft's online offerings look good, I remember this article:

http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou-m...

Of course, the NSA revelations make it hardly matter anyway.

You don't need to go that far back in time:

Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

Diddums. Most of it goes over SMTP in plain text anyway.

If you want secure communications, you don't use email or you use something you control.

There has long been an expectation of formalized privacy in emails, which was asserted in numerous laws -- basically extending the concept of regular mail to the electronic counterpart.

It's like saying "most regular envelopes go through the Post Office using plain vans, if you want secure communication you send it in an armoured van staffed by personally-vetted Congolese mercenaries". Nobody touches Post Office vans not because they're hard to assault (they're not), but because they're shielded with thick walls of law.

I know that smtp is more like sending postcards and yadda yadda yadda, but that's not what most legal systems have assumed for 20 years, nor what the public at large expects.

I agree with you but the expectation always needs to match reality. Many civilization had fallen to this sort of ignorance.

The expectation and reality should both be "they can view the mail at certain stages but if they get caught they're getting the book thrown at them, and the incentives are aligned that breaches will be reported".

True, but the NSA snooping is different than Microsoft employees looking at your pictures to make sure they are "family friendly." I hope.

But but but... They saaaay they will be nice. https://pay.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1m926j/we_are_the_out...

... thanks for the heads up. I was actually starting to like SkyDrive after I got a free winphone and started using the MS ecosystem.

Now, knowing that MS is prone to shutting down the whole account for perceived infractions? I have family photos that aren't backed up anywhere else there. That's not cool.

Honestly, even if this policy was reserved for kiddy-porn and crack-dealers, the "boom your stuff is gone no review no discussion" approach to it means the possibility of a false-positive is scary.

> Now, knowing that MS is prone to shutting down the whole account for perceived infractions?

IIRC, Google is just as prone to doing this too.

Err if you put all your eggs in one basket then you're just being an idiot.

Get a domain, forward it to service X and Y, back it up regularly, sorted.

This applies to ALL services be they free or paid.

Saying that I've had the same hotmail/msn/live/outlook account since 1997 without a problem.

> I have family photos that aren't backed up anywhere else there.

Obviously those need to be backed up. Problem solved.

At least that reduces my options back to one again! I hadn't seen that before, thanks.

Use PGP. With your existing email address, and without the fuss: https://parley.co (I'm one of the people building it, and now that outlook.com supports IMAP, we support outlook.com ;)

I haven't used Google Apps beyond a little testing, but our small shop did move to outlook.com (office365) about a year ago. Main selling points were archiving/litigation hold, included licenses for Office, and the familiarity of clients with the Microsoft name.

The experience has been as I expected it would be: quite painful. We have not gone an entire month without service disruption. There have been problems with the service getting blacklisted. Support is, well, Microsoft support -- untimely, disconnected, uncaring, and when phones are involved very difficult to understand.

Anecdotal, sure, but according to the various forum/community postings I've come across trying to resolve various issues, not uncommon.

Caveat emptor.

edit: turns out what I was talking about (office365) and what the OP is talking about (outlook.com) aren't the same thing. Apologies.

My work also uses office365, but I don't recall too many problems with it. There were some migration troubles, but not as bad as our previous setup.

However, we do have 500+ employees and are a large business for the country we're located in, so probably have a bit of weight when it comes to getting support.

Office 365 support has been ok to us so far (unlike partner support which is shit). Had a couple of hours here and there down but compared to the cost of self-hosting exchange, it's pretty damn good.

I'd imagine so... It would take 3, maybe 4 times my current pay before I even though about attempting to self-host exchange.

Nice to hear you've had good experience. Perhaps I just got unlucky and my experience isn't indicative of the overall performance of the service (and maybe it'll go better for me next time).

I thought that the mail hosting package that comes with Office 365 is called Exchange Online? It uses Outlook Web App for webmail access and is a totally different thing from the free Outlook.com.

Yup -- you're correct. Sorry about that. I guess I got confused because the outlook.com domain is in all of the email headers. Hadn't tried logging directly into outlook.com, but indeed it won't let me.

For what it's worth, we use Google Apps for Business at my workplace and our experience has been every bit as bad as yours with Outlook.

Amusingly, our Google services were once again down this morning, making it the second disruption we've had in the month of September.

And let's not even begin to discuss the abysmal multiple account support Google has, especially surrounding their mandatory-to-join G+ nonsense.

There is no decent support. Period. Google shits on support. We all know Google has a well known disdain for support. GAE is no exception. If you cannot find help in old Google Group pages, you will not get help...

Also, here's a kicker:

Google does it's best to enforce Google+ accounts on Enterprise Accounts.

So our employees are all but forced into a PUBLIC social network for our PRIVATE accounts, and because of how much mandatory integration there is with G+, we lose a lot of Google Apps functionality without having G+ accounts. We can't even use Hangouts without a Google+ account, a requirement I found disgusting and offensive.

It sucks to hear that Office365 isn't any better because I have been nothing but let down and disgusted with Google Apps for Business.

These IMAP integrations, like TripIt & Slice, have been a part of Gmail for a long time now (since Gmail has supported IMAP for years). This is Microsoft playing catch-up. But yea, I hear you..

fastmail is great. Their UI is so easy to use when you need to use it (I use IMAP).

I can't keep track of all the MS rebranding - is Outlook.com the same as Mail.Live.com, which used to be Hotmail.com?

(random aside about Microsoft's rebranding - if you want to get to the photo gallery associated with your Live.com account, you have to go to SkyDrive, because if you search for Live Photo you get the Windows 7/8 desktop application)

Yes.

Amazing how they paint EAS as a better protocol than the "older" IMAP. EAS is a beast of a protocol. Just go to the protocol page at Microsoft[1] to get scared. The list of sub protocols and data formats is terrifying! This, compared to a protocol for which the basic session can be taught in five minutes tells a lot about the quality of both protocols.

Simplicity follows good engineering. EAS is way more complex than necessary.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc425499%28v=EXCHG.%...

Of course its more complex. EAS includes a lot more than the IMAP protocol, e.g. Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Documents support.

Can you point me to an online sample session, equivalent to this: http://coewww.rutgers.edu/www1/linuxclass2010/lessons/Email/...

My point stands. EAS is not just extensive it is needlessly complex.

I've actually used IMAP.

It's horrible for many, many reasons. It is really quite an insane protocol. Mainly because it was ambiguous about so many key commands, what order they should be run in, the side effects, etc.. I picked up an app someone had written which originally only unsupported Outlook 2003(?), Outlook 2007 behaved differently to that, which behaved differently to Thunderbird, which behaved differently to Lotus Notes. Outlook 2007 even was even using a short to store ID, which I believe wasn't a unique ID and could change between sessions, so you had to search again for the message if you'd been disconnected. All because the protocol was just 'yeah, do something like this'.

There's a reason why IMAP was so ropey in many mail clients.

I have no idea about EAS, but let's not pretend IMAP is good.

Learn how to setup Outlook.com for custom domain free email hosting http://www.blogsynthesis.com/setup-microsoft-outlook-custom-... as posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6375844

Wait, one of the biggest mail providers (that did a relaunch not so long time ago) did not have IMAP until now?!

They're on the bleeding edge now!

The technology just wasn't there yet.

Not having IMAP was presumably part of a lockin strategy. I think they may now have realised that it's possible to lock yourself on the wrong side of a door.

Microsoft criticizes how Google scans your mail to provide you with targeted ads, yet they are promoting the following service which is arguably similar:

> Sift makes it easier than ever to find the products you're already interested in. It uses existing shopping content in your Outlook.com account to discover your favorite stores and products, then creates a personalized shopping experience.

The only difference is that they brand it as a feature rather than something you have to put up with in exchange for a free service.

I feel there is a very important difference between Google automatically scanning all of my emails, and Microsoft pointing out that a third-party service allows you to choose to have your inbox scanned now functions with Outlook.com.

IIRC, MS scan "to:" "from:" and "subject:" but not "content" whereas Google, they claim, does scan content.

I believe that MS scans for malware, but Google also scans to provide context based advertising.

They both provide access for the NSA anyway, don't they?

That's a different issue. This is about how they commercialize (monetize) their offerings, not about who grants what data to _Govs_. One issue is companies have more say with regard to how they monetize your data, the other is about how they are compelled, by law, to hand over your data to govts.

Amen to this.

I have a drea, that one day there will be a post relating any big software/internet corp, without a snarky comment about NSA .

I was just thinking that if you want to choose your service provider by how transparently and trustworthy your data will be treated, they both disqualify anyway.

Does anyone know if this would allow you to use outlook.com with Outlook (on the desktop) and send mail from your domain without the "on behalf of" message?

Previously if you used outlook.com with Outlook for desktop you had to use the Hotmail connector. Sending emails to others they would see from you@outlook.com on behalf of you@yourdomain.com

Yeah, I'm using my person domain with Outlook.com since Google started charging for Apps. It's working quite well, good enough for a single user at least... My only hang up had been lack of imap, but now we're all good!

Actually on behalf of is correct. If you know about DKIM and SPF then you'll work out what an arse pain all this is.

Yes, you can do that. If you login to your outlook.com account, go into settings then "Your email accounts". Here you can add send only accounts with custom SMTP just as with gmail this removes on behalf of. I've setup my desktop outlook client to use my Outlook.com address but when the message is sent by Outlook.com it uses my own domain and no "On Behalf Of".

Hope that helps..

Thanks! completely forgot that was my problem with the old Hotmail connector, you couldnt set a specific SMTP

Derp :)

"With today's announcement, we now have a richer email experience across devices and apps, including those not using EAS, such as Mac Mail and Thunderbird on a Mac."

LOL, they made sure to avoid mentioning Mail on Android...

Looks like it's still not possible to send from alias addresses with the provided SMTP server.

Outlook.com allows users to have up to 10 different alias email addresses, and the users can send emails using any of those alias addresses provided that they are sending from the desktop website of Outlook.com or the Windows 8 Mail app. However, users can only send from one of their alias addresses if users set up their Outlook.com account on any other mail client, whether using POP, IMAP, or EAS. That includes the official Outlook.com app for Android[1] and the desktop Outlook 2013 client[2], plus Thunderbird and other desktop mail clients[3].

I do hope that this issue gets addressed in the near future.

[1] http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/mail-sy...

[2] http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_...

[3] http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/mail-em...

Reposting the configuration settings:

    Incoming IMAP
        Server: imap-mail.outlook.com
        Server port: 993
        Encryption: SSL
    Outgoing SMTP
        Server: smtp-mail.outlook.com
        Server port: 587
        Encryption:  TLS

For anyone on Android having trouble setting up the outgoing SMTP settings on their mail account like I was: set the security type to STARTTLS instead of SSL/TLS.

I really wish companies would get SSL vs TLS vs STARTTLS right. I wrote about this on our blog a while back and ended up turning it into a help page because people still seem to get confused.

https://www.fastmail.fm/help/technology_ssl_vs_tls_starttls....

So far Microsoft is doing everything right with Outlook. If I didn't already have a gmail address I would easily prefer Outlook over gmail.

you can redirect it to Outlook. :)

Sorry for butting in but I've recently done this, the new Gmail compose "experience" was the final straw.

I'm happy - the only thing that is a bit weird is I'll sometimes get spam mails duplicated arriving at my outlook.com address. Never with "normal" mails only the obvious spam.

Does anyone know of an easy way to extract all my mails from Gmail? I'd like to dump them in the filesystem and then kill my Google account.

I've used gmvault[1] before, and it works pretty well at preserving labels and playing nice with Gmail's specific idioms not common among other IMAP providers.

[1] - http://gmvault.org/

Still "password can't be longer than 16 characters".

Yay! We have now finally been able to add support for Hotmail in YippieMove[1]. It has been one of the most popular feature requests since we launched back in '08.

[1] http://www.yippiemove.com

Freaking awesome, thank you MS.

You could certainly say that was about time.

On the flip side, I always thought they held back on IMAP-support for political reasons. If whatever political momentum which stalled this obviously missing feature is gone from Microsoft, that's probably a good thing which may have more positive effects down the road.

I wish they would also have starttls support. I also don't wan't smtp or imap support at all. I want only smtps and imaps support. By not supporting insecure protocols at all, you can avoid huge possibility of insecure misconfiguration.

It didn't before? Well in that case I can report that Close.io <http://close.io/> now supports full 2 way email integration with Outlook.com.

Would be nice if they could spread some of this new found IMAP love to Outlook proper. Last time I checked, support for it is still fairly half hearted :(

Funny how rebranding goes. When I use Apple Mail auto-detect (on snow leopard) account function it gives me some live.com IMAP parameters.

Finally.

The news is it didn't have it before :P

finally, welcome in the 21st century.

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