Outlook.com Premium is quite the expensive affair
Microsoft revealed Outlook.com Premium, a subscription-based version of its free Outlook.com email offering earlier this year.
Back then, the offer was only available to select customers who took part in the beta test. The company appears to have opened the doors for sign up to Outlook.com Premium to the public recently.
While limited to users from the United States currently, it is likely that the offer will be extended to other regions eventually.
At its core, it is an offer for existing Outlook users and new customers to gain access to a handful of advanced features for a yearly subscription fee.
You are probably wondering about the differences between the free and premium version of Outlook.com.
Outlook.com Premium vs Free
One of the big features of premium Outlook.com accounts is that the inbox is completely advertisement free. While that may not be important for users who use third-party clients to access their emails, those who use the Outlook.com web service to read, send and manage emails may like that.
Premium customers may also use up to five personalized email addresses instead of email addresses that Microsoft offers as part of the free service.
So, instead of picking an email address ending in .outlook.com or other domains provided to free users, premium users may pick a custom domain name instead.
They may add a custom domain they already own to their account during sign-up, or pick a new available domain for that instead.
Related to that are options to share calendars, contacts and documents between those custom email addresses.
Microsoft runs an offer currently to promote the new premium subscription option. Users who sign up for Outlook.com Premium right now get it for $19.99 instead of the regular price of $49.99 per year. Also, the custom domain, if picked and not imported, is free in the first year as well. Users who use their own custom domain can do so without extra charge.
If you think that is quite expensive, you are not alone. Google charges $5 per user for its G Suite Basic plan for instance which gets you extra features such as 30 Gigabytes of online storage, phone and email support, and video and voice calls for $60 per year.
Outlook.com Premium customers pay at least $49.99 after the first year. If they pick a custom domain for their emails, that is an extra that gets added to the total. What makes this even more unappealing is the fact that Microsoft will be the owner of the domain name you pick, and that you only get guaranteed access to the selected email addresses for as long as you pay the extra charge and remain an Outlook.com customer.
Considering that you get better value subscribing to hosting plans that get you as many email addresses as you like, ensure that you have full control over your domain, and a web hosting account on top of that, it is questionable if Microsoft's offer will be that popular.
It may even be better to sign up for a web hosting plan anyway, and use that domain for Outlook.com Premium, instead of using Microsoft's offering to use that domain through Outlook.com. The main benefit here is that you retain full ownership of the domain name regardless of your Outlook.com subscription status.
Now You: Expensive or reasonable? What's your take on the Outlook.com Premium price?
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!