Outlook.com Premium is quite the expensive affair

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 19, 2016
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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?

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Outlook.com Premium is quite the expensive affair
Article Name
Outlook.com Premium is quite the expensive affair
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Microsoft's new Outlook.com Premium subscription service for its email service is now available to users from the United States.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
      Reply

      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
    Reply

    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.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
      Reply

      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!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
      Reply

      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
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    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    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.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
    Reply

    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
    Reply

    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

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
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    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 :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
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    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.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
      Reply

      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
    Reply

    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
    Reply

    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.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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