[Maro]

Microsoft's Office 365 online office suite has an Outlook webmail client which was flawless well when I gave it a shot using Firefox. I think it costs $6/mo, no ads, no spying, because you pay for it. I don't know how well the search and spam filters work.

http://www.office365.com

Here's a demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOpCmUXLmTA

Note: This is _not_ the same thing as Hotmail.

[sarnowski]

Just because you are paying for the service does not mean that they respect your privacy. You can also pay for Google Apps, but what you get is not worth the money. Depends more on the company than on the pricing model.

(This is just a general hint - not against Microsoft. I don't know how they do their job.)

[Maro]

Microsoft advertises Office 365 / Outlook by saying that unlike Gmail, they don't "peek" at your email for ads.

The "Gmail man" ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXqrTfOWx60

[ortatherox]

That was an internal video to try raise morale in Microsoft and get some people switch, it's pretty safe to assume gmail reads your emails as much as their spam filters does. But as well as doing the spam filtering on the results it does ads.

[Estragon]

Yeah, just looking at mail to model spam is one thing. Looking at it to model the user's life and interests is quite another.

[jonknee]

Ads can be disabled for Google Apps accounts, but as should be obvious any provider that provides spam filtering will already be "peeking" at your email. Perhaps in part to their ad relevancy system, Google's spam detection is best of breed.

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...

[altano]

(Disclaimer: I work for MS)

It's $5/mo (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx). If that sounds like a lot, keep in mind that you get:

  * No ads
  * 24/7 phone support
  * Uptime SLA
  * Proper mobile support (everything supports Exchange w/ proper syncing, push email, device wipe, searching the server, etc better than IMAP)
  * Calendaring and other Exchange features
  * Great webmail (I like the latest version of OWA a lot)
  * Custom domain support
  * Etc

I want my email provider's business model to be getting dollars from me. If I didn't work for MS I perhaps would have done some more research into everything everyone else is mentioning, but I've been very happy with Office 365's email hosting and haven't needed to do any comparison shopping.

[antoncohen]

$6/month to match Google Apps features (Docs, Chat, Sites, anti-virus). Plus the $6/month doesn't include phone support ($5/month does). $10 adds phone support, but you lose Docs editing. They spent way too much time creating complicated pricing.

Google Apps for Business gets you all the features of P1 and E1, for $50/year ($4.17/month), or $5/month if you pay monthly. And Google Apps Free gets you most of the features at $0/month.

Also, Office 365 has silly User Agent checking, they don't support any Linux or Chrome on Mac, even though they support Firefox and Chrome on Windows and Firefox on Mac [1]. My understanding is if you change the User-Agent string it works in Linux.

Silly pricing, silly compatibility restrictions, less features at a higher cost than Google Apps. I'm not getting the appeal.

[1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/office365-enterprises/ff6525...