For several years now, three are the best e-mail services to read and send Email from the web: Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. A few days ago, as has also been reported in the major newspapers, Microsoft, already owner of Hotmail, launched a preview of its evolution, the new online email service Outlook.com, with the same name as the famous mail program for Windows.
The new Outlook.com service is really good, both in terms of features and functions, and in terms of the user interface that I personally find far superior to that of Gmail.
Soon, for now, think of a definitive migration, but today you can try the new Outlook.com and set up, if you wish, to use its graphic interface to send and receive mail from your Gmail, Yahoo Mail or other address .
In another article you can read the guide to combine all the Email addresses together in Outlook.com,
Those who already use Hotmail can instead immediately switch to the new Outlook.com version without having to perform any additional configuration.
Before seeing what are the 10 most interesting and winning features of the new Outlook.com, let's see how to access.
If you are already using Hotmail or you already have a Microsoft account, you can enter Outlook.com and connect with your Windows Live account.
From the Other Options menu, always from the gear button, you can create a new Alias for Outlook and then create a new Email address associated with your account .
If you do not have a Windows Live account, you can register by obtaining a new personalized address with domain @ outlook.com (since it has been active for a few days, it now becomes an opportunity to register your personal name that will probably be available).
If you want to use Outlook.com with Gmail or Yahoo Mail you can follow the guide Sign up for Outlook without changing your email address.
The top 10 features of Outlook.com are :
1) Enhanced security with the ability to access your email account using a temporary, disposable password .
This is useful, for example, to read emails from a hotel cp without fear of being stolen.
Just use the " Sign in with a disposable code " option found on the login page, under the password field.
The code is sent to your mobile phone and is valid only once.
This feature is similar to Gmail's 2-step verification.
2) Unlimited storage space for emails and attachments that are saved in your Skydrive account.
The maximum size of an email message (including attachments) that can be received in Outlook is 25 MB (similar to Gmail).
However, you can send an attachment over 25 GB in size, by uploading the file to SkyDrive, an option that appears if you send too large a file.
3) Simple recovery of deleted emails .
Any deleted email in Outlook.com can be recovered, even after emptying the trash. From the "Deleted Items" folder, you can recover any deleted messages from the link below. Gmail doesn't offer any kind of recovery for deleted messages.
4) You can easily get disposable email addresses within Outlook as the primary address alias. As written in the guide on how to create aliases in Hotmail, also on Outlook.com there is the same option in the settings menu.
5) Use HTML and CSS elements in emails to create mixed emails of text, images, videos, all formatted as in a website. Anyone who knows HTML can write a new email using the code in the HTML version of the Options menu.
6) Block or unsubscribe from newsletter news quickly and easily. In Outlook.com, all emails sent automatically by newsletters are recognized and grouped together. For each of them, at the bottom, there is a link to unsubscribe and block the reception of other messages from that address, effectively eliminating the subscription to the newsletter.
This feature is among the most important ever on Outlook.com.
7) You can open photos directly via the web, open documents through Office Web Apps and, if desired, also to edit them.
8) Integration of Outlook.com with Skype, in order to receive messages from your contacts in the Email, directly and easily.
9) From the menu at the top left you can quickly switch to the address book of people, with all the contacts of the social networks connected to Outlook.com, the calendar and Onedrive.
10) Outlook is very fast !
This is perhaps the best feature of the Microsoft mail service, which loads in an instant and allows you to manage your mail and messages as quickly as it would be using a computer program.
Finally, remember that the parameters to configure the sending and receiving of mail from an Outlook.com email address from an external program such as Microsoft Outlook or from an application for Android or from iPhone or from any other external app from the site are the same ones that were from Hotmail and precisely:
POP3 server : pop-mail.outlook.com (port 995)
SMTP server : smtp-mail.outlook.com (port 25)
You can also set the SMTP port to 587 with TLS or SSL.
SSL and authentication must be enabled.
Read another article for Outlook.com IMAP configuration parameters
