Question about Outlook Express

Hi Riley_I,

I am one of the lead engineers working on Outlook.com. We don't have a direct email address for the engineering team however feedback provided under on the Feedback form under the gear icon in Outlook.com does come to us and does get reviewed.

I believe I meet the criteria you have called out above and would be happy to try assist. If you can provide a little more detail of the problem you are experiencing I will see what I can do to help or resolve it for you. If it pertains to account sensitive data let me know and I'll arrange a PM so that you can provide details.

Thanks

Hi Riley_I,

I understand your concerns and have been investigating if there any alternatives given your situation. I would point out however that the issues you have called out actually relate to Microsoft Account which is in fact managed and developed separately from Outlook.com since it is utilized across several Microsoft products including Windows 8, Windows Phone, SkyDrive, XBOX e.t.c. My remit extends to Outlook.com Mail and Calendar specifically. That being said we do work closely with the Microsoft Account team.

The requirement as I understand was added by the Microsoft Account team largely for two measures; to assist incase you forget your password and secondly to combat account hijacking as it makes the process difficult for hijackers to take over an account. Without a secondary method of validation situations could occur where customers would find it difficult or even impossible to validate their original ownership. So whilst I acknowledge there is definitely some additional administrative overhead on the part of the customer the intention is entirely to provide additional protection.

The effort of setting up a second account on Outlook.com should be minimal. I believe you can set each account to be the backup for the other. You mention that you will have to continually manage it, I would like to understand more what it is you feel requires continual management. Once set up there should be very little management of the account required.

One thing that was pointed out to me (I'm not sure if it was clear or not at setup) was that when using a phone number it does not need to be a cell phone, it can be a landline since we have voice validation too. The phone also does not have to specifically belong to you, just one you have access to should you be required to validate your details.

I understand your difficulty regarding the password change, I was also faced with this recently too and was required to change my password everywhere. Whilst it is an inconvenience when this happens it should only be triggered when some activity is detected that might be cause for concern, there is no timed forced change unless you specifically enable that option under the account settings. If it is asking you the change the password frequently I would strongly advise keeping the maximum of security enabled on the account to ensure you are fully protected.

Without direct influence over this area the best I can offer is to relay your feedback to my counterparts on the Accounts team so that they can take this into consideration when planning.

I hope there is some way in which we can find a resolution to your problem, should you decide to back up your email from the Outlook.com site the best recommendation I can make would be to use a desktop client and download the mail from Outlook.com. Outlook for example will then allow you to save the mail as a personal folders or archive to your hard drive.

Being a long term customer I believe you must hold high value on the content of your mailbox and as such I hope you can understand that the recent changes on the accounts side are aimed purely at protecting your content to ensure you keep your data yours. I never thought my account would be hijacked until one of my secondary accounts was taken over one day and cleaned out (my take from this was you never believe it will happen to you until it does). One of our top priorities is to always ensure that you are protected to the best of yours and our ability.

I will definitely pass on your concerns to the relevant people in the accounts team. From the Outlook.com Mail and Calendar perspective the advice above is the best solution we are able to provide currently.

...should you decide to back up your email from the Outlook.com site the best recommendation I can make would be to use a desktop client and download the mail from Outlook.com. Outlook for example will then allow you to save the mail as a personal folders or archive to your hard drive.