Outlook.com – Microsoft’s cloud-based email service

Outlook.com Cloud Service is a free cloud-based version of Microsoft’s email service. Outlook.com provides a personal email account and is tightly integrated with Microsoft cloud services.

This new cloud-based email service has several differences from its competitors.

Outlook.com users get an almost unlimited mailbox size for free, so the lack of free space, and hence the possible loss of mail messages, does not threaten users of this service. Gmail, for example, allocates 10 GB of disk space to its users on its server for free.

The maximum size for message attachments in Outlook.com is up to 100MB, and when using OneDrive (SkyDrive) cloud storage, the size of a roaming file will increase to 300MB (via the web interface). In Gmail, the maximum size for message attachments is currently 25MB.

This is good news for video and photo lovers who send their files via email. However, any other files can be sent as an attachment to the letter.

According to Microsoft, the content of personal correspondence and attachments in letters is not analyzed in order to use the information received for advertising purposes (a stone in the garden of Google).

The mail service interface is made in the Modern UI (Metro) style, which leaves a pleasant impression. It is fast and convenient to work in it.

Now let’s move on to an overview of Outlook.com.

Signing up for Outlook.com

To register for the service, you need to go to the company’s website login.live.com . If you already have a Microsoft account (Windows Live ID), then you should fill in the appropriate fields, and then click on the “Login” button.

This will open the main Outlook.com mail window. Hotmail, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Windows Live users already have an account.

If you do not have a Microsoft account, then you need to click on the “Sign up” link to get an account.

In the next “Microsoft Account” window, you will need to enter your personal information to create a Microsoft account. It is not necessary to enter real personal data, here you can enter such data that will be convenient for you when using the created e-mail box.

You can choose a name for your Outlook.com mailbox. An account can be linked to a mobile phone number to recover your password or to get a temporary password for a one-time login to the mail service, for example, from someone else’s computer.

After filling in all the data, you need to click on the “Accept” button.

After that, you get to the Outlook.com service page, where you need to click on the “Go to mail” button.

Set up Outlook.com

This is what the main window of the Outlook.com mail service looks like. Microsoft has recently been unifying the look and feel of its applications and services.

Services, apps and services are now designed in a single modern style, the design uses a tiled interface in the metro style of the Windows 8 operating system.

If your mail data was transferred to Outlook.com, then you will see your folders and messages, settings and address book will be transferred there automatically.

To create a message, you need to click on the “Create” button located on the top panel, in the upper left corner of the mail service page window. The message will be sent from the mailbox you’re signed in to Outlook.com from.

You can customize the text of the message you enter as you wish using a text editor and using the command of the “Options” button for this.

Outlook.com has a cool new feature: edit messages in HTML format. Letters can be assigned different levels of importance.

When working with a message, you can “Add the sender to the contact list”, perform certain actions with the message.

If your email address frequently receives newsletters, Outlook.com recognizes such messages and sends them to your Junk folder. How to deal with such messages, you must decide for yourself by clicking on such a message with the right mouse button, and selecting a specific action from the context menu.

You can customize the color of the Outlook.com interface to your liking by clicking on the “Settings” (gear) icon and selecting the desired color from the various colors offered by the service from the pop-up menu.

The Outlook.com mail service is integrated with other Microsoft applications. After clicking on the arrow next to the “Outlook” button, a tile bar appears with tiles to sign in to other Microsoft services.

In Outlook.com, you can recover deleted messages even if you have emptied the Trash before.

For more detailed settings of Outlook.com, if you are not satisfied with the default cloud service settings, you will need to click on the “Settings” icon (gear) => “Other mail settings”. On the open page, you will need to make the necessary settings for the mail service.

Add contacts to Outlook.com

If you have multiple mailboxes in different email services, you can add these mailboxes to Outlook.com to receive and send messages from other mailboxes using Outlook Online.

To do this, you must click on the “Settings” button (gear) on the panel. In the pop-up menu, select “More mail options”.

On the “Settings” page, click on the “Your email accounts” button. On the “Your email accounts” page, you need to select one of the proposed options: “Add a send only account” or “Add a send and receive account”.

After setting up a new account, the added account will be available on the right sidebar in the “Folders” section. Now you can send or receive messages using different email accounts through the Outlook.com service.

You can also import mail and settings from Outlook Express, Windows Mail, or Windows Live Mail.

Going forward, Microsoft intends to migrate all of its email services to Outlook.com, and support for older services will be discontinued. Users can continue to use the old suffixes, but for now it is possible to choose a “nice or desirable” email address with the @outlook.com suffix while you can.

You can get a new email address ending @outlook.com from your @hotmail.com or @live.ru mail service if you select “switch to Outlook” in “Options”.

You can continue to use @hotmail.com , @live.com , or @msn.com email addresses , and you can rename your account to @outlook.com or add an alias.

Create an alias in Outlook.com

Using the Create Alias ​​feature allows you to create multiple mailboxes with different addresses in the same Microsoft account. You can create up to five aliases in one account. Thus, together with the main mailbox, there will be a total of six mailboxes.

You can also create an unlimited number of Microsoft accounts, and create even more aliases in them.

To create an alias, you need to click on the “Settings” button (gear) => “Other mail settings” => “Create an alias for Outlook” on the top panel. After confirming the name and password, you will be signed in to your Microsoft account.

On the Microsoft Account page, you need to select an email address. You can choose from email addresses with the endings @outlook.com , @hotmail.com ,  @live.ru . Next, click on the “Create Alias” button.

In the pop-up window “Setting an alternative name”, you will need to activate the radio button opposite one of the items: “To an existing folder: Inbox”, or “Create a folder: with an alias address”.

If you select “Create a folder: with an alias address”, messages will be sent to a separate folder, and if you select “To an existing folder: Inbox”, messages will be sent to the general folder “Inbox”. After selecting the folder, click on the “Finish” button.

After creating a new alias, a confirmation email will be sent to your inbox stating that your alias is ready and you can use it.

Using a pseudonym is convenient for correspondence with different correspondents. In this case, you do not have to use different mailboxes in different mail services. Incoming messages sent to the aliases you create will go to your Outlook.com account.

To send a message, you need to click on the “Create” button and next to your account name, click on the arrow and select the address of the sender of the letter in the pop-up window (the letter can be sent on behalf of one of the aliases).

The only negative is that you can not change the name of the sender of the letter. You can create a Microsoft account using a fictitious name instead of your real name.

How to connect social networks

Outlook.com is tightly integrated with social networks, social network contacts are supported: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina.

To communicate with your friends and acquaintances directly through Outlook.com, you will need to add your contacts from these social networks. To do this, click on the arrow next to the “Outlook” button with your mouse pointer, and then click on the “People” tile.

On the “People” page, you can add your contacts from the presented social networks. To add contacts, you need to click on the image of the social network, and in the pop-up window, click on the “Connect” button. After entering and confirming your registration data, your contact list will be imported into the Outlook.com mail service.

After adding contacts from social networks, incoming messages from social networks can be added to the folders created for this. Added contacts can be edited, combined, grouped, deleted.

To create a new contact on the “People” page, you must click on the “Create” button. On the next page, you can enter the details of your new contact manually by filling in the appropriate fields for this, and then click on the “Save” button.

From the Outlook.com service window, you can communicate with your friends and acquaintances on social networks. After clicking on the icon on the right of the panel, in the form of a smiling man’s head, a side panel will open with a list of available contacts from the social network Facebook, or from the MSN network.

In order to start instant messaging, you need to double-click on the name of the interlocutor.

To save the history of received and sent instant messages, you will need to click on the “Settings” icon (gear) on the panel, and then select “Other mail settings” => “Message log” in the context menu. On the “Message Log” page, you should activate the “Save instant messages” item.

OneDrive cloud storage

After clicking on the “OneDrive” tile, the OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) cloud file storage window will open. This cloud storage is provided free of charge for storing files, with a total size of 5 GB.

From the OneDrive service page window, you can download the OneDrive app to install on your computer. It will be possible to move files between a computer, or other device, and cloud storage via a web interface.

From the OneDrive storage window, after clicking on the “Create” button, you can proceed to use the Office Online cloud office application. When using this application, you can create, open, edit and save Microsoft Office documents directly in the browser window: Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoin presentations, OneNote notes.

You can read more about using OneDrive cloud file storage in this article.

Office Online Cloud Apps

You can open received office documents immediately in the mail service window after receiving a message with an attached document.

After opening the received letter, you need to click on the link “Show contents”. Next, you need to click on the inscription “Watch on the Internet” on the thumbnail of the received document.

The document will then open in Office Online. If you want to change an open document, then you will need to click on the “Edit” button.

The document will be moved to OneDrive online storage, where it will be opened in Word Online cloud text editor.

In the online version of the Word text editor, you can work with an open document from this computer, and then continue further work on this document from another computer or mobile device if the OneDrive service application is installed on the mobile device.

To save the received document to your computer, you need to click on the link “Download as a ZIP archive”.

Free calls via Skype to Outlook.com

integrated the web version of the Skype online program into the Outlook.com mail service . After adding a Skype account, users can make free video calls directly from the Outlook.com mail service window, without launching the program itself, but using the web interface of the mail service.

Article Conclusions

Outlook.com is Microsoft’s cloud-based email service and has some interesting, rich functionality. Outlook Cloud Mail will be a good choice for the user.