Thank you. I was afraid I would lose my accounts. I've been paying every year, but couldn't remember why -lol. Thanks again!
SA,
I received a message also to pay for next year, but the message is referring to a Windows Live Hotmail Plus subscription? Does this mean WLM or just the Hotmail/Outlook.com Web Email Service?? The included 10 GB of email storage refers to storage on Microsoft' Servers or the Cloud, not on your Computer which is limited to your Hard Drive size. It does not say how much Server or Cloud storage you will receive without a Hotmail Plus or Outlook Ad-Free Account??!! Here is a copy of my 1 Jan 16 email message sent to me from Microsoft: (Bold and Underlining added by me!)
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1 Jan 2015 Email Sent Out to Me by Microsoft as reminder that $19.95 is due for 2016:
Hello Mitchell -----------,
Your Windows Live Hotmail Plus subscription is scheduled to be automatically renewed on Monday, February 01, 2016. Please retain a copy of this message for your records. Here is a description of the service:
The Ad-free Outlook.com yearly subscription of $19.95 plus tax includes 10 Gigabytes of Outlook.com email storage and exemption from the account expiration policy. No third party advertising. Just feature tips and product info from Microsoft. Refund only available if cancelled within one month from purchase and automatically renews yearly unless cancelled. You will receive a renewal letter 30 days prior to the renewal date. (This is the renewal letter or message!?)
Your Subscription is subject to the Microsoft Service Agreement [link to at http://explore.live.com/microsoft-service-agreement?ref=none]
Please confirm that your account and payment information is up to date.
To review or update your payment options, sign in to Microsoft account - Billing and select a payment option that you would like to update.
If you do not want to renew this subscription, you must sign in to Microsoft account - Billing Subscriptions and cancel the subscription before the renewal date shown above.
Thank you!
Microsoft
Note: This message was sent from an unmonitored address. Please do not respond to this message.
To receive notifications at a different email address, sign in to your
Microsoft account - Billing profile.
For more information on online safety visit
http://www.microsoft.com/phishing.
Microsoft respects your privacy, to learn more, please read our online privacy statement at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=74170
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
------------------------------------------------
Suggest you check or review what MS or Outlook may take away, if you do not pay for your Hotmail Plus or Ad Free Outlook accounts for next year, as their email above may not include everything as it is pretty vague or unclear! I did and Posted it below:
Should you upgrade to Ad-free Outlook.com? (Hotmail Plus)? Here are great Tips from LoginTips.com that offer much more detailed and valuable information than Microsoft does or ever did:
Like Yahoo offering Yahoo Mail Plus, Microsoft has a premium version of its free webmail service: it is called "", and used to be known as "". The new name doesn't quite do justice to the offering, as you'll learn in this tutorial - even less so because the new ad format is as unobtrusive as it gets (ads in the old Hotmail interface were hard to miss!) The pricing -for nearly a decade- has been $19.95 per year (US dollars). Billed annually, it averages out to about $1.66 per month, USD. Since Microsoft has legal representation in most -if not all- states, you'll be charged sales taxes on top of that.
With increasing competition between Webmail providers (AOL Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and the others), the original benefits have become somewhat obsolete. Current advantages of Ad-Free Outlook (Hotmail Plus):
In our opinion, the true advantage of paying for ad-free Outlook is actually not the ads, but the fact that your account will never expire. A regular Hotmail.com / Outlook.com account will automatically be deactivated if you don't login for three months (after that, you get a 30-day grace period before the username becomes available for anyone else to sign up). The motivation is four-fold:
The bottom line answer, in our opinion, is a resounding "". Even if you operate your own website (we do :), with control over hosting and email accounts (we do!), you never know when you'll need to switch provider. At that time, you'll need to download all
your mail, and re-upload it to the new mail server (harder and more tedious than it sounds).
Note: neither AOL Mail nor Gmail currently offer a premium service that locks your email address (Google offers something similar, but its history of regularly killing services makes us hesitant). Yahoo Mail does offer the "Plus" version of
its webmail service, but things seem in constant motion since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO, including a crazy hike in Yahoo Mail Plus yearly fees for new users - which makes us
think (only an opinion, without supporting evidence) that Yahoo may want to slowly move away from the offering - the price jumped
from USD $19.99 to $49.99
. So, given everything we've said above, Ad-free Outlook.com looks like the best overall choice.
How to Upgrade Your Outlook.com Email Account to Ad-Free Outlook.com:
Once logged into your account, click on Settings (gear icon in the top right corner of the page), and select "Options". On the next screen, click on the "Upgrade to Ad-free Outlook.com" link (last link under
the first section on the left). This link will open in a new window (in Internet Explorer, you can hold down the and keys on your keyboard while clicking a link, to temporarily override your popup blocker!) Then, follow the rest of the instructions: it's
a simple check-out and online payment form, currently hosted on signup.msn.com. Your subscription renews yearly, on the same date. You can cancel at any point before the next renewal date, and your credit card
won't be billed for that next year. Tip: this link disappears once you've become a member / subscriber. At that time, you can manage your subscription by clicking on the first link in that same section, labeled "". This is also how you cancel
your membership - from the new Account window that opens.
Import, Export, Backup Import contacts from CSV Import Gmail contacts Import Yahoo contacts Import AOL contacts Import old Hotmail contacts Export contacts
What is the difference between MSN, Hotmail, Outlook, Windows Live Mail?
Unless you're in tech (and even then!), Microsoft's branding department makes things difficult to follow. It uses the same core product name across offerings, heavily uses , and when it comes to email -be it webmail or desktop email programs- things get even worse. In this tutorial, we'll clarify the differences between Clients MSN, Hotmail, Outlook Express, Outlook and Outlook.com, Outlook Web Access and Apps Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Mail. There are basically two possibilities, but four combinations: a web-based email service, from desktop / laptop computers or from mobile devices, or a native application, either on Windows / Mac OS X desktop or on a mobile device. Let's get started:
There are two ways to check your emails: if you do it inside a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.), you are using a webmail client, which is a particular type of web app. (The word "" is just short for "" - just another way of saying ""). The screenshot on the left shows Microsoft's current webmail offering, called Outlook.com, loaded in the company's web browser, Internet Explorer. It may look a bit different from your version, because we're paying yearly to get the upgraded version, called "Ad-Free Outlook.com", which used to be called "").
If you launch a program to check your emails, whether it's from a desktop / laptop computer, or from a mobile device, you are using an email program: these are called desktop email clients when they run on a . When that program is designed for a tablet, , or cell phone / smartphone, it's often called a mobile mail app. (Note: you use Hotmail's "mail server settings", a special set of codes, to allow your email application to "talk" to Microsoft's mail servers). The screenshot on the right shows Windows Live Mail, Microsoft's free email program for desktops - more on that later.
Despite the multiple names, Microsoft only has two webmail offerings: the one for consumer is called Outlook.com, but is still best known as Hotmail. If you check your Hotmail account using a mobile device's web browser, things will look different because you are using the mobile version of Hotmail. The screenshot on the left shows the mobile version of Outlook.com, as viewed on an iPhone. Not to be confused with the free Microsoft Outlook app available in the App Store! The second offering is Outlook Web Access.
In 1997, Microsoft acquired one of the first online email services, which was called "": that's a play on words for geeks, because the capitalized letters "" are the name of the markup language used to design web pages ("HTML"
stands for ""). Microsoft changed its name to simply "", and offered it for free;
MSN, the name of the company's online offerings when the web was becoming mainstream, stands for "". On the left is a screenshot of one of the very earliest version of MSN Hotmail (image source:
Wikipedia
).
Back when Microsoft was battling legal issues for alleged antitrust practices, the company started the "" division to create software and services for Windows users - a way of adding value to the operating system, without appearing to remove choice from users. Initially, Microsoft planned on renaming Hotmail "", but ultimately kept the well-known brand in the name. At the same period, it was launching a free email program to-be-called "", which ultimately became known as "". On the left is a screenshot of the webmail offering, when it was called "" - one of the most beautiful executions of a web-based email system, which we were sad to see retired in 2012
Windows Mail: Microsoft actually gave the same name of "Windows Mail" to different email programs: the first is the Outlook Express successor that shipped bundled with Windows Vista. It does include adaptive spam filters
and defense mechanisms against phishing attempts, but doesn't add much to the already mature offering that was Outlook Express. It is possible, but complicated, to run Windows Mail on Windows 7 - so it's, really, only usable on Windows Vista. Check out our
Windows Mail tutorial.
Microsoft Outlook: Microsoft Outlook has been part of the Microsoft Office productivity suite since Office 95. It is more a personal information manager (PIM) than just an email program. It includes a calendar, advanced contact manager,
tasks management, and more. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.
Outlook 2003 was the last version to use standard menus; with
Outlook 2007, Microsoft introduced "", an interface element that combines menus and toolbars into one. It refined it in
Outlook 2010; Outlook 2013, the current version, is virtually identical for most users, but with a plain and eye-tiring interface (even with the darkest color scheme available.
Conclusion: If you plan on using a Microsoft email account from a web browser,
Outlook.com is the current offering; if your employer uses an Exchange Server, or if you subscribe to Office 365, you can use
Outlook Web App (""). On the Windows desktop, a good choice for a free email program is
Windows Live Mail, especially if you are using Windows Vista or later (so that you can run the latest version). A great, paid email program, for Windows or Mac OS X, is
Microsoft Outlook, the email client and PIM that can be purchased separately, and is bundled
with several versions of Office. On mobile devices, which all have good built-in mobile mail apps, you can search the App Store or Google Play store for the
Outlook app, or alternative mobile mail clients.
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For your Info,, here are the benefits of the Original Version of Hotmail Plus:
"Hotmail Plus" is the name Microsoft gives to the top version of Hotmail ("Windows Live Hotmail") - which costs $19.95 per year, and comes with several perks this tutorial will go over. Before delving into the details of the Hotmail Plus offering, let us just say to clear any confusion: Hotmail is, and remains, a free webmail service ("webmail" = emails you check from the web, without needing to use an email program). Windows Live Hotmail, as it is officially known, gets its revenues from the ads displayed alongside your emails; you are under no obligation to pay for Hotmail, and Hotmail Plus is an optional service that makes your email experience much more enjoyable. The probably most noteworthy, and perhaps best selling point, of Hotmail Plus, is that it disables the ads: you get all the functionality of the original Hotmail, with more features (described below), but absolutely no ads anywhere. That alone, we think, is well worth paying $20 per year for Hotmail Plus! The rules of the game have somewhat changed since Hotmail became "Outlook.com", so check out our tutorial on "Ad Free Outlook.com", the successor to Hotmail Plus. Webmail providers offer so much for free accounts nowadays, that it becomes hard to justify paying extra for a premium account. Or does it? (Hint, read the linked tutorial :)
Hotmail Plus features
As mentioned above, Hotmail Plus comes without any ads displayed alongside your emails: this makes the Hotmail experience a lot more enjoyable: the screens are less cluttered, and pages load faster since Hotmail Plus does not have to download
the graphical banner ads the regular Hotmail has to. This also makes reading your emails quite a bit less stressful, since many of these banner ads are animated, and the movement is very distracting when you are trying to concentrate on reading your emails
- no such problem with Hotmail Plus.
All the following are free upgrades you get with your Hotmail Plus account, in addition to removing the ads. The last section of this tutorial will show you how to sign up with Hotmail Plus if you are convinced. Note that Hotmail Plus does not offer you free tech support from Hotmail or anything like that - it is the same email service, minus the ads, and with the following free upgrades after the yearly fee is paid.
Hotmail Plus storage The regular Hotmail allows you for 5 gigabytes of storage for your emails, which grows as needed; Hotmail Plus doubles that and starts with 10Gb storage (still grows as your needs evolve). This is not much of a case for Hotmail Plus, since very few people will even get close to 1Gb of emails stored online. Hotmail Plus attachments The regular Hotmail allows for up to 10 megabytes file attachments, which corresponds to about 4 high resolution pictures. Hotmail Plus allows you to send email attachments of up to 20 Mb, or the double of regular Hotmail. For an in-depth overview of limitations with attachments in Hotmail, how to overcome them, etc. - please see our Hotmail attachments tutorial and our tutorial on Hotmail size limits - both tutorials also discuss Hotmail Plus. Hotmail Plus "Reserved Email Account" feature Unlike the regular Hotmail, your email account will not be disconnected if you fail to login regularly - this is nice to have, but probably a non-issue for anyone who uses Hotmail regularly. Any business owner who uses Hotmail as their professional email should without a doubt pay for Hotmail Plus to avoid any problem. Hotmail Plus enhanced junk mail filtering: more safe senders Hotmail Plus doubles the number of "safe senders" you can have configured - the regular Hotmail currently allows you to mark up to 250 email addresses as "safe" - Hotmail Plus doubles that to up to 500 registered safe senders. Hotmail Plus and email forwarding Unlike Hotmail Plus, the regular Hotmail does not let you forward emails to email accounts . To clarify: you can manually forward emails to anyone with both regular Hotmail and Hotmail Plus, but you cannot setup automatic mail forwarding of all incoming mail to an external email address (an email address different from "@msn.com", "@live.com", @hotmail.com", and local versions of these sites). Hotmail Plus and distribution lists and custom filters. Without more details available, Hotmail Plus also advertises the ability to include more recipients in your email distribution lists, and the ability to create more custom filters ("email rules") to automatically sort through and organize your emails.
Hotmail Plus cannot be downloaded, since it is a webmail service, but you can get Windows Live Mail as a free download to connect with the Hotmail Plus servers (more detailed information is upcoming on Hotmail Plus IMAP and Hotmail Plus POP3 server information).
PS: This was a long Post, but it actually gives you the History of MS' Email Clients and Email Apps, which is Great as Otherwise they make no since to most people and Microsoft does not provide this info!!
MitchZZ
