Outlook.com is out! Now ask the Outlook.com team your questions!

[Team Outlook]

Hello folks! It's been very exciting to see all the great reaction and discussion going on ever since we launched the new Outlook.com email service last week. We've also seen a number of questions pop up along the way as well. So we'd like to open up this thread for you guys to ask us, the Outlook.com team, your questions and provide feedback. We'll keep this open for a couple of days to let the questions flow in. We'll then close it up and respond to your questions via a video reply (meaning we won't directly reply to your comments on the thread). We do expect a lot of questions so we'll do our best to answer everything as best we can, but we might not get to every specific question. Also, we can't comment on any future product features or releases, so do keep that in mind.

With that, let us know what you think about Outlook.com, what you'd like to see, what issues you're having and just anything in general you'd like to ask about the product!

The Outlook.com Team

[articuno1au]

It's good to see you guys running this again :)

No question here, just saying :p

[f0rk_b0mb]

Will there be a stand alone metro app or will the mail client built into Windows 8 suffice?

[flexkeyboard]

What will happen to the Windows Live Mail on the desktop? Is the outlook team part of Windows Live?

[nanoware]

i have a old .edu outlook email address, and i wasnt able to add my account to the metro mail app in the windows 8 CP. Woudnt sync my email. Has this been fixed?

[daniel_rh]

Is there going to be a MSN Messenger app with the Windows 8 UI (besides the one integrated to Windows 8)? What about the Windows Live Essentials applications like Gallery, movie maker?

[gregalto]

Here is my biggest issue/transition...I very much liked "archive" on Gmail...is there a similar feature on Outlook.com? I havent found it yet/want it!

[Travelar]

Well done and I'm enjoying the interface. How can I merge two Outlook.com accounts? I didn't see the option for aliases the first time through, so I set up the second account that I needed. I'd like to delete one account and turn the other into alias. I don't want the 270 days for the deleted account to clear the system.

[Power2Game]

Needs better Themes.

[scumdogmillionaire]

In Hotmail I was always annoyed that when I wanted to add a birthday to my Birthday calendar it created a Contact record, too. I like the Birthday Calendar, but I don't want contact records for children, animals, etc... can you please change that for Outlook.com!? :)

[Ci7]

Why didn't you push the update into live?

would live hotmail(live.com) get phased out?

love the direction you are heading with outlook

great job MS (Y)

[xchaser]

Why can't I receive my msn.com mail in outlook.com?

[Ci7]

Is there going to be a MSN Messenger app with the Windows 8 UI (besides the one integrated to Windows 8)? What about the Windows Live Essentials applications like Gallery, movie maker?

Wave 6 got integrated into Windows 8

you are screwed! :p

[Nagamasa]

Will Outlook.com ever support IMAP? [Or any other method to effortlessly move emails away/to Outlook.com besides using ActiveSync/Outlook]?

And also asked, will there ever be a way to merge Microsoft Accounts? Before the aliases were created, many of us had multiple accounts.

e.g.,) deleting the old account, with the old email rendered only as an alias in the new account.

Side topic: any ETA on when the Calendar will be updated?

[Rory Zane Ross]

I like how Outlook gives the user ability to access all their email in one place, but Outlook has yet to put yahoo mail as one of those options. Will Microsoft add yahoo mail to that list in the near future?

[Singh400]

I mentioned this issue on Twitter and I didn't get a response so I'm mentioning it here.

Why does Outlook scrape my Facebook profile pic and display it?

I've no idea if the issue was looked into, or even if it was fixed. But please don't assume that I want my Facebook profile to be displayed alongside my @outlook.com/@hotmail.com adress.

Thanks,

Singh

[Marshall Veteran]

I'm not a fan of the 'Metro' interface but this looks so much better than hotmail. Kudos to your team.

[drcrawfo]

I would love to see the ability to create more advanced rules for sorting mail, particularly boolean operators. A quick view for all mail (sent, received, all folders) would be great. I'll also second the desire for an "archive" option. I don't want messages to sit in my inbox, but I don't necessarily want to delete them or file them into a specific folder.

[BajiRav]

How do you avoid branding confusion with Outlook and Outlook.com?

Is there a way to see all my online contacts in one place (similar to the Hotmail version of web messenger) without switching to People?

Can I permanently filter my Contacts/People such that my birthday calendar only shows my actual contacts?

When I receive email to one of my aliases and reply using a Windows Phone, the email goes out as my actual Outlook id instead of the alias? Can you fix this or do the WP guys need to do it?

Anyway to customize People theme similar to Outlook?

Any plans to allow custom fields in People/Contacts such that I can assign say two mobile phones to a contact? Right now I can only have one type of phone (mobile/home/work) per contact.

[bdsams Veteran]

Here's my question! I had a previous skydrive account with 25gb and now I have an awesome outlook.com domain, can i bring over that skydrive account to my new outlook.com one? I really don't want to lose my 25Gbs!

[Matthew_Thepc]

Some things: When will we get...ability to delete contacts imported from Facebook, ability to change the pictures for contacts, ABILITY TO CHAT WITH GMAIL would be more than awesome :D, and the ability to pop out the chat window are all I can think of off the top of my head, but I'm sure I'll think of more ;P

ehehe, and as for a real question instead of bug improvement, when are you going to roll out the Metro (oh, and what are you guys planning to call Metro?) SkyDrive and Metro Calendar panes? And how are you planning to market it (like, TV/web/newspaper/magazine ads)?

[TheRomit]

Please enable Send Email As so that I can move my personalized domain email to Outlook.com :-)

Having said that, what is the best way to move my 4GB mailbox from Office 365 to Outlook.com? Are you planning to have some import/migrate functionality? It is very slow and unreliable doing it from local PST to local PST via Outlook 2010.

[Andreas Balzer]

1) Did you consider the consequences of people renaming their accounts? Windows Phone devices need to be reset, XBox needs to be reconfigured, .. Would have been nice to get them reconfigured automatically

2) Is it possible to migrate Office 365 Interface to Outlook.com and vice versa? How/why not?

3) In my opinion the Outlook.com Interface is a mess. The menu bar on top seems to be visually seperated from the emails although their buttons are supposed to trigger events on emails. Will there be any improvements to the UI or is it final?

4) There is a Magnitude of Client applications to access emails (Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, ..) Anything on your "agenda" to unify These in the next 20 >years?

5) The connected experience between XBox, Windows Music, ..., Windows Media Center, Windows Phone, Skype (application) and Outlook.com just doesn't seem to be there. I won't ask for anything on your agenda but changes would be nice ;-)

[Thorsman]

Congratulation on delivering a great service in outlook.com! Are you planning to give us the option to make localized adresses as you did with live.com adresses? E. g. will we be able to make an adress like name@outlook.no? I would love it!

Keep up the good work!

[Singh400]

I mentioned this issue on Twitter and I didn't get a response so I'm mentioning it here.

Why does Outlook scrape my Facebook profile pic and display it?

I've no idea if the issue was looked into, or even if it was fixed. But please don't assume that I want my Facebook profile to be displayed alongside my @outlook.com/@hotmail.com adress.

Thanks,

Singh

In addition to that, why is there a 16 max characters policy enforced on passwords?

And not to be too negative - I love the new UI. It's fantastic.

Thanks,

Singh