Outlook.com launch a gold rush for jokers, spammers Microsoft's servers have been going bonkers processing account requests for its newly launched Outlook.com webmail service, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Redmond's Gmail competitor may be less of a breakout success than it would have us believe. On Tuesday, just six hours after the service launched, the …
It's pretty close. Most of the time the emails are only being trusted to the recipient's mail server. Mail doesn't tend to get bounced from server to server much - if at all - these days. It's probably about as trustable as you can get. Eventually you have to trust some other server unless you stick to internal mail :)
First; the whole Outlook.com stuff is a hack, and a very crude one at that. I'm not saying this due to the interface or such; that's fine enough to work with. If you work with Outlook 2010 on a daily basis (which I do) then its even somewhat bearable. No, if you select any other option besides mail; like the used-to-be integrated SkyDrive or Calendar function you're taken right back to the old Hotmail interface. In my opinion that's a too poor of a design to be even remotely funny.
At the very least give us users a properly integrated environment to work with instead of something which feels like several individual parts roughly glued together by a couple of huge buttons.
But I also call this a hoax... "One million people signed up" ? No, that would be 999.999 because I never signed up for this; I was simply thrown into Outlook.com the moment when I checked my Hotmail inbox. I tried outlook.com but gave up and moved back to Hotmail. Why not if you're constantly thrown back into Hotmail anyway the very moment when you want to check your SkyDrive or calendar using something else besides your phone (I'm on WP7) ?
This is IMO another classic example as to why MS needs to get their act together and stop ruining good working stuff "because". Haven't those idiots (personal opinion) never stopped to think that while outlook.com may attract some new users it could also mean others might walk off when you enforce this upon them?
But my biggest gripe with all this, the one which IMVHO overshadows all: When oh when will Microsoft FINALLY realize that the only time they should launch a new product is WHEN IT'S ACTUALLY READY ?!!1
(1 was typed for a more dramatic effect ;-))
Seriously; they had a not too bad (IMO) * integrated * environment from which you could access your mail, your Messenger contacts, Calendar /and/ SkyDrive all from the same web interface. And they broke it up for reasons I haven't managed to grasp yet.
@ShelLuser
"Haven't those idiots (personal opinion) never stopped to think that while outlook.com may attract some new users it could also mean others might walk off when you enforce this upon them?"
The last version of Outlook I was forced to use was unreliable and a pain in the neck. While that might have been down to bad configuration, the very name leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The name Outlook also reminds me of the huge amounts of spam I got at that time because our superiors couldn't be bothered addressing the issue.
No thanks.
By Win8 minimalism you really mean 'chromeless Metro-fication with some silly wastage of space'.
I have an old hotmail account. Logged in, tried the new outlook dot com interface, reverted back to good ol' hotmail.
With the new UI, you need one additional click to sort emails and do most other common email tasks.
Microsoft devs, simplifying the UI is about making something more functionally *elegant*, and NOT about universally dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator. Until you have fully grasped this fundamental concept, your designed UI will be crap.
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I confess that I did sign up. Partly to claim my "own" handle, partly just to see what looked new, but mostly in hopes of an effective anti-spam system. Right now my impression is that I will not be using it. Perhaps quarterly visits to keep my handle?
The #1 problem of email remains spam, and I could not find ANY evidence of new anti-spam capabilities within outlook.com. I had some hopes. As part of their "Let's be less evil" campaign, Microsoft has been doing some good work upstream against the spammers, so it was possible they were ready to take some action on the downstream end. If so, I could not find it. Sorry, but I don't need another email address for the spammers to abuse.
There are lots of possibilities, but here is what I think would most satisfy me. It would be an integrated spam-fighting system something like SpamCop, but on steroids. Rather than one round of analysis with a confirmation of complaints to the spammer's ISP and webhost, I want a multi-round system that would gradually refine the analysis and targeting to go after ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, to pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help and protect ALL of the spammers' victims. You don't have to use it, but I sure would. I really hate spam and I want to have the tools to be a spam fighter first class.
Just to get decent name@address, but will I use it?
Probably not much, but yet-another-email address, so far unknown to spammers is sometime nice.
The UI is a little too stripped down, (esp on my iPad) but otherwise.. it works.
Suspect it is slow though - first email I sent from the Outlook account took ages to pop up in Gmail.
Yup. (we're a small business that moved to using Office365 about a year ago......Outlook.com plays nicely with setting it up on an android device)
POP setting
Server name: XXXX.outlook.com
Port: 995
Encryption method: SSL
IMAP setting
Server name: XXXXX.outlook.com
Port: 993
Encryption method: SSL
SMTP setting
Server name: XXXXX.outlook.com
Port: 587
Encryption method: TLS
"Whenever a new major email service comes out (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) I usually sign up to try it out," a reader who goes by "MrP-" tells El Reg in an email. "Also being a Microsoft service and being named Outlook.com it seems like an important address to have."
really?? does no one really understand why the outlook mail app has been "lovingly" known as "lookout!" for over a decade? hotmaul^H^Hil is no better... and then there's the forced tie in with that bing thing... my servers /still/, after a decade of inquires, record searches from the m$ based "thing" searching for URLs that have never existed... we're talking about completely numerical URLs with various dashes and underlines in them... NO one from any of the M$ base search services has been able to answer this question and it has been put to all of them more times than i care to count and voiced in more ways than the gestapo would question a known caught in the act criminal...
I just had to register theregister@outlook.com. Time to find that leaked list of email addresses from last year and start sending everyone "official" letters for the release of funds....
I know im a shit.
And yes I really do have the email :P little surprised that no one else here on ElReg thought of that....let alone the staff.
For those of you who are too young to remember, back in the day you could have got a very cool @rocketmail email account... until Rocketmail was hastily acquired by Yahoo. Some friends of mine, to this day, still have a @rocketmail email account.
But Microsoft is in for a rude shock if it thinks leveraging the Outlook (Office is successful) brand onto webmail is going to enable it to compete with rivals. This is the same logical fallacy that assumes that leveraging Metro touch-centric UI onto desktop users for Windows 8 will make them more likely to pick up a Windows 8 phone or tablet.
It's also a shame that Microsoft is scrapping Hotmail, one of its more iconic brands which is immediately identifiable with Microsoft.
I gave up on all Microsoft web properties years ago as I just got sick of the hoop jumping needed. I used to keep a couple of Hotmail accounts along with yahoo etc for online signups. Problem was Hotmail (at the time) didn't do POP3 and if you didn't check the account every two months, it was closed. Yahoo only needed checking every 4 months to prevent expiry, but since it did do POP3 checking was no extra effort.
But you'd still need a Hotmail/Live/whatever account to sign up to some other marginally interesting MS service - often just a peek at a single message on an MS "Group". They'd insist on a Hotmail address to sign up to Passport, and Passport to get access to whatever bloody service it was, although even that usually entailed some extra kind signup of it's own - half an hour to access one barely interesting post just ate away at my will to live, not least as you'd have to jump through it all again 3 months later. As a result I'm sure I'm now actually allergic to certain shades of blue. I'm sure there was a plan in there somewhere, but fuck knows what it was.
Just assuming that anything Microsoft do that involves signing up will never ever be energy well spent works really well for me, and anyway, when was the last time a new free email service was actually interesting?
If you use Firefox, I can heartily recommend the Bloody Vikings! add-on.
Essentially it can use one of any number of disposable email services, with a single right click in a text field, it launches the free email in another tab and pastes the address in. Sure, it doesn't save you much time, but it makes it slick.
so, assuming that apparently the average is four new addresses each, we can probably conclude that around 250,000 cynical old-timers have resigned themselves to MS 'new' Outlook offering as a price for getting an email address at least close to their own name for the first time in a while.
Will they use them as their main email accounts?, not really.
Is this move yet another example of just how out of touch with their user base MS is?
Absolutely!
"Could anything with a growth rate like that possibly be human?"
My sarcasm detector is normally pretty good (as is my generator) but I wasn't sure if this was serious or not.
Clearly the graph is like that because the X-axis has a resolution of whole days and it went from zero to a million in one step of that axis, rather than a consistent rate of 40,000 per hour or whatever.
As a backup in case it was a joke .. hahahaha.
I find that hard to believe.
I just bagged an account as real.name@outlook.com. So what you you ask? Well, my name is common as muck and would have expected it to be snapped well before 1 Million registrations unless a large number of registrations are similar to wtbzYujj@outlook.com
Common as muck? True, perhaps.
My name is Anonymous Coward as well, but for some reason I was able to register that email address without any problems at all.
So, contact me here, anonymous.coward@outlook.com
I hereby open this account for random abuse by the register readership
AC, obviously :)
Can't they just stick with one email domain? We've had @hotmail.com, @live.com, now @outlook.com. I've probably missed some too.
FWIW, I got my 'real name' account, no trouble. Apologies to the Australian artist, British wedding photographer, and British bankrupt who share my name.
Ok, going to be rather unusual here...but I actually like it. Much nicer than Gmail and the interface feels very desktop mail client. Shame about the calendar and file storage thing going back to old Hotmail style, but over all it looks good and feels very nippy to use. I few lil quirks that hopefully they'll sort out, but over all I prefer it greatly over Gmail so far.
After years of managing without a hotmail account I signed up last year to get access to the evaluation versions of a couple of Microsoft products.
I have never used my hotmail address for any other purpose, but the pills 'n' potions spammers still managed to reach me.
Unless they have scraped firstname.lastname from elsewhere and decided to give @hotmail a try with that I don't see how they got my address.
Managed to get my own name - yay!
No support for IMAP or EWS - huge fail!!
Come on MS - at least give us EWS access so that those of us that don't use MS based email clients can actually use you service! Not everybody likes web interfaces - slow and clunky - when we have native email clients instead.
(I use a Mac - only POP3 support for Hotmail in 10.6 in Mac Mail, and it seems no real support for Outlook 2011:mac.....)
And, I think the 'You have registered too many accounts today' message is based on IP address. Going through the corp proxy server didn't allow me to register, using a different Internet link did. Again, another not so smart move from MS.
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read about outlook.com yesterday, it never even occurred to me to sign up. it was the LAST thing on my mind.
Today I read of the gold rush to bag the good accounts, and, well why not.
got real.name, got firstinitiallastname, hmm what else can i have. sadly firstname is taken.
i might use these accounts to apply for jobs because:
a. outlook is synonymous with business, before today nobody outside of business ever gave a fuck about outlook.
b. most recruiters are highly refined pure grade scum and i'm tired of giving them my real address because i just get spammed the fuck out and they dont even give me the job
The name I wanted was gone so I grabbed a similar one. Nevermind, its not that important.
After reading it had a good iPad interface I was surprised to find it was little more that just text + box. Seems like they are taking the "clean and minimal" thing a bit far.
I see hubris ahead.
I have my own domain, albeit hosted by an ISP (I'm just one person, I'm not going to run my own mail and web servers).
I have a gmail address as secondary.
I have a Yahoo address for registration with potential spam sources, etc.
I have three e-mail addresses. Actually one is enough. Why does Microsoft think that everything they come up is going to get people flocking to them when they get it elsewhere already? Another search engine; Another email server ...its all just another.
The Microsoft dream of adding more and more monopolies is ...just a dream. They own the desktop, at least for now. With stuff like this they are, and always will be, just playing catch up, from a long way behind.
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