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

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

36 points by arturogarrido 13 years ago | 33 comments

sergiotapia 13 years ago |

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! :)

gman99 13 years ago | |

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.

IanDrake 13 years ago | |

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

draggnar 13 years ago | |

the sweep feature in particular is very well done.

xradionut 13 years ago |

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

meaty 13 years ago | |

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

Zirro 13 years ago | | |

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

ayi 13 years ago |

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

angry-hacker 13 years ago | |

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

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

TobbenTM 13 years ago | |

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.

myko 13 years ago | |

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

It's that bad.

mhd 13 years ago |

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.

hdra 13 years ago |

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...

forgotAgain 13 years ago |

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.

personlurking 13 years ago | |

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

jxi 13 years ago | | |

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.

smackfu 13 years ago | |

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

nodata 13 years ago |

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

Toshio 13 years ago |

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

pav3l 13 years ago | |

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

BozeWolf 13 years ago |

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.

riffraff 13 years ago | |

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.

BozeWolf 13 years ago | | |

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.

dpark 13 years ago | |

> 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.