Outlook.com: 400 million active accounts, Hotmail upgrade complete and more features on the way
www.office.com/setup Blogs: When we launched the preview of Outlook.com, our goal was to build the best email service in the world, capable of scaling to over a billion active customers. When Outlook.com came out of preview, it was already the fastest growing email service thanks to your support. The last two months have seen the release of a new, modern Outlook.com calendar, a refreshed Outlook.com app for Android devices, two-factor authentication for your account, new international domains for people around the world, and the release of a preview of Skype calling in Outlook.com.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active Outlook.com accounts, including 125 million that are accessing email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync. We’re also pleased to announce that we’re adding two new features to Outlook.com: SMTP send, so it’s easier to send mail from different email addresses, and deeper integration with SkyDrive.
Completing the upgrade: migrating 150 petabytes of email in just 6 weeks
When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts. However, Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts. This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes–equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data–and making sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day. With your help, we were able to do all of that in just about 6 weeks. We’ve spent the last few weeks ensuring that everything was completed in line with our high quality expectations. We’ve been focused throughout the upgrade on ensuring that every customer has a great experience. We’ve been overwhelmed with the response so far, based on the comments we’ve received. Here are just a few of the verbatim comments that were sent through the in-product feedback tool:- “Oh my goshwow!!! This is gorgeous! I didn’t see this coming – this is a very welcome experience. Thanks for the new outlook.com!”
- “This is awesome. I’d like to say these changes will definitely make me come back and delete my other accounts like google and yahoo! This is much smoother to navigate and transitioning between skydrive and mail is awesome. This is such a big improvement. I have not played with much of the features yet, but thank you thank you. Alias setup was painless and ease of use is bar none. I’d definitely recommend to my friends.”
- “Wow!! The interface is perfect, modern and feels like Windows 8. I’m really enjoying the new UI approach from Microsoft.”
- Do I have to change my email address? No, you will always be able to use your Hotmail address. No need to ever change,
- Do I need to update settings on your phone or other apps? No, since you keep using your same email address, there is no need to change any settings on your devices.
- What happens with Hotmail Plus? Your Hotmail Plus account will continue to work with Outlook.com, no need to make any changes. As before, your account never expires and you don’t see any ads.