Microsoft has (re-)launched its free public email service (previously branded “hotmail” and “windows live”) under the brand “outlook”. Outlook has been Microsoft’s email client on the corporate desktop for many years now, so they may be hoping that the new look email product will benefit from the existing brand’s goodwill.
However, I noticed from a posting on El Reg today that whilst Microsoft were breathlessly boasting “One million people have signed up for a new, modern email experience at Outlook.com. Thanks!” they were not apparently being careful about differentiating between people, and accounts. The Reg article notes that some new users have signed up to multiple accounts and/or accounts with unlikely names (such as steveballmer@outlook.com and satan@outlook.com). So I moseyed on over to the new service to take a look.
I am now the proud owner of the email account “linus-torvalds@outlook.com”.
I’m pretty sure that Linus himself would not want that particular address, but if he does, and Microsoft don’t delete it in a clean-up operation, then he is welcome to it. Personally I shan’t be using the service.
2 comments
I’m confused – I thought it was outlook.exe? :) Actually, .exe would be an awesome TLD to have from a hacking perspective..
Author
Well, so long as your program conformed to the memory model required of a .com file (code, data, unitialised memory etc. all in the same segment) and the program did not exceed 64KB in size you might have been able to convert the linked executable .exe to a .com by running exe2bin – but it probably (usually) wouldn’t work if you wrote the code in anything other than assembler. Most compilers refused to limit themselves to that model. :-)
(See, I have a sinful past. I just about remember my DOS programming.)
But I like the idea of a .exe TLD.