Outlook.com with custom/own domain

[Commodore]

Does anyone have experience with outlook.com mail services on custom/own domains? If I understood it correctly, you can have one domain and up to 50 accounts on the free version. Is catch-all and mail forwarding supported? What do they do with www.yourdomain.xyz; I mean, can you put a simple page there as well (so you can dismiss your hosting provider completely, if you don't really need to host a website)?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I have two domains at http://domains.live.com/ - you can have up to 500 email accounts and request more. They do not support catchall mailboxes (they are spam magnets). I don't think they support forwarding, other than by the user logging into their email account and configuring it.

AFAIK, there is no actual web hosting, only email. You need a hosting account elsewhere. if you need file sharing via skydrive, you can set up custom urls - i use files.domain.com, which rolls to a skydrive login page.

FWIW, godaddy gives free hosting with domain names - regular HTML pages have a godaddy banner but wordpress sites seem to be free of godaddy banners. GoDaddy also does forwarding, but I'm not sure if its unlimited addresses. Zoneedit can host DNS records and does email forwarding (all addresses need to be forwarded, i think).

 

[Jason]

I'm sorry, but the notion that a catchall is a spam magnet simply isn't true, and people need to stop using it as an excuse for not building features.

In fact, a catchall is supremely useful for avoiding spam. By using a different address for everything you sign up for, it's easy to track where e-mails come from, how to filter them, and who may be sharing your address.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Believe me, I've used catchalls and they are spam magnets - all it takes is one dictionary attack to prove it. Better is a mail service that lets you create temp addresses or like gmail, where you can use alias+whatever@gmail.com - that lets you track addresses without allowing a dictionary attack.

I think (but could be wrong) that many linux servers support the +keyword method.

To update the comments about using live domains, that service is ending.

 

[Commodore]

From my experience, the spam magnet depends on whether a domain is a "high profile" or a "low profile" one. I've had catch-all turned on in the past for all my domains, and I only had to turn it off for my oldest domain which was registered in the late 90s. The reason for spam to random addresses at that domain was likely just the fact that around the turn of the century we didn't yet take that much care when using own domain's email addresses to sign up for various online services. The others are safe, even with a catch-all, though.

Yep, I read yesterday about Microsoft cancelling free custom domain plans. For now, only Zoho remains with the free plan, AFAIK.