[jmcintyre]

I think the announcement was a setup, but not the person who asked the question. It was pretty obvious that someone was going to ask that question, you could bet on it.

The person writes this:

>Skepticism be damned, I'm actually an actual person who asked an actual question. I saw on Twitter that Outlook.com would be doing an AMA, and nobody asked the IMAP question yet, so I did. I've been a lurker on Reddit for several years.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1m926j/we_are_the_outl...

Now, it's possible it's an employee, but I wouldn't rate it as "most certainly" like you did, it was obvious that someone was going to ask this question.

[skafka]

Hey everyone, I'm the person who made the announcement on Reddit this morning. I can assure you that we did not go ask anyone to give us that question. But, did we know someone would? Of course. Every single blog post we've done for the last year has asked about it. If you look at our twitter account, it only took one minute yesterday after we announced the AMA session for someone to ask. We thought it would be a fun thing to do for the Reddit community.

[Samuel_Michon]

This is one of the things I love about HN. People we talk about here actually read the articles and comments.

Feature request: like they do on Reddit with iAMAs, give posters the opportunity to verify with staff that they are who they say they are.

[microtonal]

I love what you did! Of course it is set up, as you say, by waiting until someone asked the question. But it's refreshing compared to corporate-speak announcements that we tend to get bombarded with ;).