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I been using Outlook.com / Live Domain Services for a while now. Here are some issues I face

- Catch-all address is not supported.

- If you want to connect one email to multiple accounts, (for easy switching between your domain emails) you have a limit of 5 accounts linked together.

- No IMAP support, but Push works well. Add as an exchange account to iPhone and sync all the folders.

- Only Office365 ( Premium service ) has good MS support, the free service has a community based support at Microsoft Answers which is well, pathetic.

- At times ( quite a few times ) it forgets, you have created a new email and has 100s of mail in the your Inbox as you been using it from months and it gives you the first-time setup page. Don't panic, just log out,clear cache and try again. Everything would be fine and back to normal.

One suggestion, if you switch and create an email account and for some reason want to reconfigure everything again. Make sure you delete all the email addresses you created. If you do not do that, after reconfiguring live services won't let your create that email for like forever ( 3 months wait time till its gets cleared from the system )Yes, even if its your verified domain.



some one please explain what IMAP support means.. every time someone mentions outlook they mention lack of IMAP as its disadvantage. and also why it is such an important feature?


IMAP - Internet Message Access Protocol.

Consider IMAP as being the cloud email service. All the emails are pulled on your device/web/client whenever you want or whenever they arrive. Its like the standard protocol for all possible clients/interfaces to pull the mails for you.

Soon after IMAP was created, Microsoft introduced its own protocol called MAPI ( Messaging Application Programming Interface ) which practically is IMAP for hotmail/outlook. MAPI is now commonly known as Exchange as it runs on their Exchange Servers.

Practically all email services ( apart from outlook/hotmail) support IMAP now as its accepted almost everywhere and used on all web/device/clients.

As Exchange/MAPI are Microsoft products, only companies that have their own Exchange mail servers or use Windows Live Hotmail/Outlook servers will be able to use MAPI/Exchange.


Exchange/MAPI on the other hand always seems to support push mail. IMAP IDLE exists but many clients do not provide support for it, for example Mail.app for iOS. And if you use Gmail on a few devices via IMAP, you easily run into the annoying 'too many simultaneous connections' issue.

(I use IMAP nevertheless since Exchange/MAPI has some annoying issues on iOS if used with Gmail and Exchange/MAP is not supported by Mail.app on OS X.)


It means you can sync your email to an email client (like thunderbird or outlook). If you read an email on your desktop, it will sync that action to the webmail account.

Having IMAP is worth it...


EAS is supported on Outlook.com, so I believe connecting it to desktop Outlook should work fine. Thunderbird, not so much.


TL;DR Using IMAP is like syncing each account. If it's 'Read' in one account it's marked as 'Read' in all, same goes for delete or send or whatever.

The more basic approach 'POP' downloads a copy, no syncing.




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