Microsoft's Outlook.com launched officially; gets 60M users in 6-month test run

Microsoft's new e-mail service Outlook.com has been launched officially, according to an official blogpost. Rolled out in July 2012, Outlook.com is a free cloud e-mail service and claims to have registered  more than 60 million users in the 6-month test run.

The software giant has introduced some interesting features for its new e-mail service. These include social media integration, temporary password, display creating an Alias and more (read our full review of Outlook.com here preview.

The email service replaces advertising with the latest updates from Facebook or Twitter when users are reading email from one of their contacts.

"People saw 60 per cent fewer ads when using Outlook.com because they're now getting much more relevant updates from their friends," claims the blog.

Now the company plans to kick off a huge push across a number of countries around the world to drive greater awareness and adoption of Outlook.com. "Our goal is to make people everywhere aware of the new and compelling features provided by Outlook.com and to make it easy for them to give Outlook.com a try as a new email service," the blogpost says.

Microsoft, which had bought Hotmail from Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1998, will also migrate current Hotmail/Live users to the new service. It will soon upgrade every Hotmail user to Outlook.com. However, everything related to your @hotmail.com ID will remain the same – be it e-mail address, password, messages, folders, contacts, rules or vacation replies – with no disruption in service. When upgraded, users will also get all the benefits of the all-new Outlook.com.

"And we won't ever make you switch your email address to an @outlook.com address if you don't want to," reads the blogpost.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)