Sunday, December 30, 2012

Some Hotmail users being switched over to Outlook.com without consent; to give feedback to the Outlook team

A few minutes ago I was loading up my email accounts for Techman's World, which uses Windows Live Admin Center to power the email and other collaboration features. I have custom branding enabled, so I have my logo show on Microsoft's web services when someone is using a @techmansworld.com account. Outlook.com does not work well with custom branding, so I kept my accounts that I had control over under Hotmail, with a nice dark green background to really make the site's logo stand out.


Anyways, I loaded up the page today to discover that it was running Outlook.com instead. I was thinking of whether I turned it on or not, and meanwhile the page finished loading. I didn't screenshot it, but it basically said that they switched it on to we can give them our feedback.

However, this wasn't the day that Microsoft was going to force everyone to Outlook.com. You can click the settings gear and then choose switch back to Hotmail if you like, and of course you get a little box that comes up that asks you if you want to skip the sending of feedback or to send feedback to Microsoft.

My dad, who also uses Hotmail (but personally), said that he was switched to it the other day without his consent either, and he changed it back. So now I know that this isn't just me. Anyone else have this happen to them?