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Microsoft Trials Outlook Premium For $4 Per Month, With No Ads and Custom Domains (pcworld.com) 108

Posted by BeauHD from the sweet-spot dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Microsoft is testing a premium version of Outlook.com that removes the ads and supports custom domains for email addresses. According to Brad Sams at Thurrott.com, Outlook Premium is free for one year and then costs $3.99 per month during the trial phase, though it's only available by invite for now. The service appears to combine two features that Microsoft offers or has offered in the past. The first is an ad-free version of Outlook, which is already available today as a $20 per year upgrade. The second is custom domains, which allow users to enjoy Outlook.com's features but with a personalized email address. Outlook Premium could also slightly undercut Google's Apps for Work plans, which support custom domains for $5 per user per month. It also offers a middle ground between ad-free Outlook and a full Office 365 subscription. While Outlook Premium may be tempting for a select few, general users may be hard-pressed to pay anything for Outlook, let alone $4 per month.
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Microsoft Trials Outlook Premium For $4 Per Month, With No Ads and Custom Domains More

Microsoft Trials Outlook Premium For $4 Per Month, With No Ads and Custom Domains

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  • I always figured we should be able to make systems exposed and unstable for free.

  • No, Thank You (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fastmail is a far better option. Fastmail is run by guys who truly know what they are doing. I've been a satisfied user for over 10 years. Yes, it costs money. Yes, it's completely worth the small amount you pay to have the best paid email on the planet. You can use their domains or use one of your own with the right plan. I'm not affiliated with Fastmail, just an extremely happy customer.

    Fastmail [fastmail.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      Yandex, yes those guys, does this sort of thing for free. I've got my email setup with their mx records and it works out well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      Outlook/Exchange is not just email.
      • Neither is Fastmail. They also provide calendar and contacts in the web app and with CalDAV / CardDAV sync. I run my own server for these things, but they look like a good option to recommend for my less technical friends.

  • I love how Microsoft started by giving Office applications away for free, regardless of whether or not you wanted them on your PC back in the 90's. And now you have to pay for it.

    • Re:Irony of Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @04:54PM (#51840903) Homepage Journal
      It isn't ironic at all. Drug dealers do the same thing: first hit is free. It works.

    • Not to stand up for Microsoft, but I don't remember Office ever being free. Maybe some of the old DOS versions of Word/Excel, etc? But I do remember paying for a copy of Office '97 on CD-ROM(!)

      I know a lot of the cheap clones like Packard Bell, et. al. would come with a copy of "Microsoft Works" (chuckle), which were incompatible file-format wise from Office.

      • I may have been misinformed, but they did make the suite excessively cheap and had lawsuits for monopolization for a while because of it.

        • I may have been misinformed, but they did make the suite excessively cheap and had lawsuits for monopolization for a while because of it.

          You need to support that claim. Office was always excessively expensive. It was, and remains, one of their cash cows

          • Re:Irony of Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)

            by kqs ( 1038910 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @07:20PM (#51841763)

            You must be young. In the 90s, Office was very expensive, but new computers often had "free" copies of Word bundled with or preinstalled on the computer. Microsoft kept this up until they got most of Word Perfect's market share. Then they started bundling Microsoft Works, making Works less compatible with Word, and charging for Word and Office. After they had the entire word processing market they stopped bundling any office-type software with their computers and made you buy it.

            • It was expensive, but Lotus and quadro were more expensive than Excel.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              No, they never had free copies of word bundled, they did have "Microsoft Works", which at best could be described as Words bastard red headed step child. I think now it's called Wordpad and is still shipped with windows for free. But Word, it is not. I've seen trial versions of Office, but that's the closest to free I've ever seen.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Macfox ( 50100 )
                Mod parent up. Works (Office's poor cousin) was bundled for free. Office was never free, until they offered the starter edition 2010.
              • I don't think it was free, but I do remember a lot of machines coming with Works (which was a full integrated office suite, similar to ClarisWorks) and Word bundled as the cheap option (MS Office as the expensive option). Quite a few manufacturers did not offer a machine without Windows and a smaller number didn't offer one without Word + Works. You can be forgiven for thinking that it's free, when Microsoft has made it a condition of a discount on the OS licenses that the manufacturer bundle it with ever

              • The only thing that sounds similar to this is Windows machines (XP included) coming with WordPad which is a very cut down word processor which can read MS Word files, but can't write to them. It's a basic word processor and was of no competition to any other word processor on the market at any point in time.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by donak ( 609594 )

              Actually, if you had to download Outlook Express, which was the free email program at that time, a free copy of Word came along for the ride because it was actually the editor (in the background) for the purpose of writing / composing emails ...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by afidel ( 530433 )

          The Novell lawsuit was dismissed as it was complete crap. As far as free suites from MS you might be remembering Works, a stripped down productivity suite that could open some MS Office document formats, that was as cheap as $2 to OEM's and so was often included in the purchase price.

  • Ads? (Score:5, Informative)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @04:53PM (#51840897) Homepage Journal
    Seriously? Who actually sees ads at this point? If you aren't running an Adblocker you are just setting yourself up for malware and worse. I haven't seen an online ad in 10 years.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Even funnier is if you go to outlook.com with an adblocker. The sidebar where the ad appears is still there, but with a message that reads something to the effect of "So you run an adblocker. If you upgrade to ad free, you won't have to put up with this box on the side either."

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by afidel ( 530433 )

        Yes, and if you run an intelligent ad blocker you can just block the element with the message =)

  • If they serve me no ads and didn't use the emails to build a psychological advertising profile to sell to to marketers and the TLAs.

  • Free webmail is now a commodity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @05:06PM (#51840973)
    Instead of creating new content and apps, the legacy desktop software vendors of the world -- Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, etc. -- continue to subscription-wall their suites in order to try to move users into constantly paying for stuff, forever, rather than forcing them to upgrade every few years. Unfortunately (for them), the younger, more tech-savvy Facebook generation isn't going to buy into their rent-seeking model -- they'll just find another "free" option and use that until it's gone or crapified to the point of being useless (heck, a lot of Adobe's products are mostly there already). The desktop software world will probably look a lot different in another decade, for the first time since the birth of the Internet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      You say it like it's a good thing, isn't one of the primary complaints around here that the "younger, more tech-savvy Facebook generation" have absolutely oblivious or have no qualms about being tracked, analyzed and marketed to as long as the product or service is "free"? Including various variations where they're planning to get you hooked and squeeze money from you later, whether the initial product is free - "freemium" - or paid with DLC. Most people here seem to be extremely fed up with ads and being n

      • or have no qualms about being tracked, analyzed and marketed to as long as the product or service is "free"?

        Something for something. I have no problem having my location tracked on my Android phone. In return I get excellent traffic services which are a real benefit to me which would be almost prohibitively expensive to reply otherwise.

        Windows 10's tracking on the other hand can fuck right off. Windows 10 Insider tracking on the other hand is quite acceptable since you potentially see a real benefit in sharing your data with the company developing a product.

        People don't have qualms as long as it's seen as a suita

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bazorg ( 911295 )

      the younger, more tech-savvy Facebook generation isn't going to buy into their rent-seeking model -- they'll just find another "free" option and use that until it's gone or crapified to the point of being useless

      Isn't that the same generation that buys virtual dolls and turnips to improve their score in Farmville?

  • If they are competing with Google Apps (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Then it should be free for custom domains for users who Google Apps is giving that to for free because we were there when we made it... get it?

    That's the trouble with all this kid-robbing, basically you never award the right people unless they do wrong with anything that the doing-wrong people have (boatloads of cash).

  • with live mail I believe it was. It was same as Gmail. I used it for a few years but then went back to pop/webhosting.

  • This is exactly what I was waiting for (Score:3)

    by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @05:28PM (#51841113)

    I have had the $5/mo google apps for a long time and am in the process of moving my stuff over to MS. I use MS Office online way more than google docs so it makes sense for me. Plus I think that outlook.com is a cleaner interface than Gmail.

    I am currently doing an old fashioned forward to my Outlook.com mailbox from gmail.

    Only problem is, in order to use my custom domains on MS, I need to use an O365 business plan which would come with OneDrive for Business (Groove) and Skype for Business (Lync) instead of the home user versions.

    I don't want to use the business editions for that reason.

  • Or I could just keep using Thunderbird (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @05:54PM (#51841243)
    Or I could just keep using Thunderbird with no ads for free like I've been doing since it was born?

  • Or are they saying it WILL have ads? I've never seen any.

    • Or are they saying it WILL have ads? I've never seen any.

      Summary is misleading. Outlook does not have ads, and never had. outlook.com does have ads in the free version. outlook.com is a hosted email solution. You can use it through the web interface or any other email reader - including Outlook (the application).

  • After the way Microsof treated Windows 7 users... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @06:51PM (#51841593)
    ... I no longer trust Microsoft enough to give them any more money.
  • That's not a bad deal, at least for the trial phase. Outlook licenses come with hosted Exchange services now that are generally about $10/month per mailbox. It's certainly worth $10/month/user. Still, I can't believe that MS would undercut their own resellers.

  • Spam (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ark42 ( 522144 ) <slashdot@@@morpheussoftware...net> on Monday April 04, 2016 @07:33PM (#51841825) Homepage

    Using Outlook.com for email is a bad idea. So much legitimate email is never delivered, and you won't know what you're missing. It doesn't go to spam or junk or anything. They just delete email and don't warn you. You might as well set your primary MX record to 127.0.0.1 because email with outlook is about that useful.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JSG ( 82708 )

      Very true. If you are serious about your email then register a "vanity" domain and get it hosted.

      Obviously the denizens around here would then fire up a pair of DNS servers at two different locations, a SMTP daemon, IMAP or POP or whatever daemon, sort out auth, SSL/TLS, AV/anti spam, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, backups, DR plan etc etc. Well I did.

      Oh and it supports Outlook (spent quite some time with Wireshark to get the auto discover thing working - cheers MS, no need to follow RFCs or say Mozilla's method)

  • For a year or so after launch outlook.com allowed the user to use a custom domain - and that was the problem.

    "domain" singular.

    If you used more than one domain and you wanted me@domainone.com and me@domaintwo.net and me@domainthree.org all pointing at the same mailbox, you needed three MS Live accounts each set up differently and a bunch of forwarding rules to get email all to one place, it was hideously primitive. Compared with Google Apps's domain alias system it just sucked.

  • And they never came with a free email account or email storage. Now I need to rent ANOTHER email client. What in the hell has changed that would make me need another version of an email client? Will anyone ever invent a piece of software that just works without making it not work? Why would I want to rent something that can be made to have infinite copies of for free when I already have it via several paid versions? What the fuck are you guys smoking at MS, cuz it sure as hell ain't weed?

  • Or get mailbox.org for â1/mth with GPG suppor (Score:3)

    by PsyQ ( 87838 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @04:34AM (#51843841) Homepage

    They've been running email servers since 1989, they write books about running email systems, they teach admins how to do email, they sponsor and take part in Linux events and the boss himself answers questions on Reddit. The system even shows you whether your recipient's mail server is able to receive your message via encrypted channels, right in the recipient box.

  • With some of the cutbacks and revisions over at Google, with their personalized service over the last few years, I'm a long time apps user who might be open to a subscription based outlook.com service. It's a good idea, and we need more free market competition. Google, at least up until this point has remained generally unrivaled in this space for too long, and it's been suffering from many of the main factors that made Microsoft a huge pain in the ass for so long. This is good news for everybody. At least,

  • This whole time in windows 10 i've been using the equivalent of express mail....no wonder why I thought it sucked.

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