Microsoft’s domains.live.com

kamvip · 30-04-2007, 08:08 PM

I have been a webhost for quite some time now, providing hosting to people for there personal websites and most importantly there business site. Everyone knows that a company looks more proffesional with there personalised domain email address e.g. sales@mybusiness.com instead of the free, over populated @hotmail.com.

Having a personalised domain email address give customers the feel that they are contacting a proffesional company, not a company that is run as a little money on the site and cheap by having a free hotmail account.

Microsoft’s free email service. Domains.live.com is a pretty neat service where they host email and IM for you for a domain that you already own. The list of free offerings includes 20 email accounts within your domain (instead of hotmail.com or msn.com), Hotmail web accessibility along with the standard junk mail filtering and virus scanning. You can request more accounts and even allow members to sign up for a email address under your domain.

So you have a domain and you want to use Hotmail’s email and IM functionality instead of your ISP’s base offerings. To do that with Domains.live.com, you modify the MX record for your domain name and set the mail exchange host provided by Microsoft for your domain name. Once you make your DNS change and update the TTL on your side, Domains.live.com verifies the DNS change and then you are ready to start creating accounts. You can create up to 20 email address for each domain and the process really works well. To check out the functionality, I updated the DNS record for one of my host and everything worked like a charm. I was able to setup an email address and then log into Hotmail and MSN Messenger using that address and everything worked great. Kudos to Microsoft and the Custom Domains Team.

Check it out at Domains.live.com.

I hope you find this useful, i have and so have alot of my customers.

Have a nice day, Kam

Ash_mk · 30-04-2007, 08:57 PM

Is this real ? I thought microsoft always used a subdomain of microsoft or msn.

kamvip · 30-04-2007, 09:25 PM

Its Real! For example, www.chromemail.com and go to sign up for an email address. You sign up and login via the hotmail/live email system. You can even use it for msn.

**double_d77** · 01-05-2007, 06:23 PM

I've close the poll as it isn't needed or relevant to this thread

Dave

**MustHaveMobiles** · 01-05-2007, 06:24 PM

I'm struggling to see the benefits as opposed to normal email client service?

kamvip · 01-05-2007, 07:02 PM

It lets you have your own domain as your email address (e.g. sales@YOURDOMAIN.com) and is run by a reliable email hosting service, with junk filters ect...

**MustHaveMobiles** · 01-05-2007, 09:08 PM

but so does your own site?

kamvip · 01-05-2007, 10:00 PM

But the service is more reliable, safer (junk filters) and say you have limited bandwidth uses!? Why suck up your own bandwidth when you can use microsofts...

**MustHaveMobiles** · 01-05-2007, 11:06 PM

Bandwidth usage is minimal in all honesty, filters can be sorted simply and reliability isn't a major issue if you chose a reliable host. Not being argumentative just cannot see any true worth in doing this via MS as opposed to controlling your own domain email etc..

kamvip · 02-05-2007, 08:05 AM

Some people may want to use there own webmail, but as a host that provides the most popular cPanel control panel, it dont come with the best webmail solutions and customers always ask for a better email scripts. MS provides there email service and you have lots of choice on layouts that have been built to make life easy.