The paid upgrade version of Outlook.com is now available with the usual, but enticing, opening offer.

For an annual fee you get extras beyond the usual free offering:

No Ads – on the browser interface version of your mailbox.

Custom Domain – instead of using outlook.com, email addresses with your own domain.  You can buy a new domain via Microsoft or use a domain you already own.  Having your own domain is very useful because it gives you independence from any mail host.

Five email accounts – for the annual fee

Sharing – share contacts, calendar and documents among the five email addresses linked to your custom domain.

There’s no extra storage or storage guarantee with the paid Outlook.com.  Free Outlook.com has a vague ‘unlimited’ storage offer but customers will remember the short-lived ‘unlimited’ OneDrive promise which was later withdrawn.

Until the end of March 2017 pay US$19.99 for these extra features for a year.  A custom domain costs $10 extra.  The regular price is $49.99.

At the moment, this is only available to US customers.  See https://premium.outlook.com/#/Offer

Outlook what?

Microsoft has put many of their email services and programs under the ‘Outlook’ name, to the confusion of many people.

Outlook.com is Microsoft personal mail hosting service. It’s the successor to Hotmail but now includes calendar, contacts and other cloud hosted services.

Outlook for Windows or Outlook for Mac are separate, but related, programs.

The Outlook apps for Apple and Android are separate mobile device apps.  We do NOT recommend these Outlook apps because of privacy concerns.  Unlike the Windows/Mac programs, the Outlook apps route all your data and passwords through Microsoft servers, even for email accounts not hosted by Microsoft.

The Outlook programs and apps work with Outlook.com but don’t require it.  You can use Outlook programs/apps with any mail host you like.