Problem I found with Outlook.com

You know, I haven't really covered Outlook.com here that much. For all I know, not much details have come out about it, so I have nothing to write about. Not today, because I found a problem with Outlook.com, and it is a compatibility bug.

I have Hotmail set up as my default email program on my Windows XP installation. By default that gets installed when you install Windows Live Essentials for Windows XP I believe, and although it uses IE as the program that hosts the Hotmail page, it is still better then having it set to something else, such as Windows Live Mail, as I do not use desktop email clients as my email client because of privacy reasons. I'll explain more about that after I finish explaing the bug.
The option in the start menu works great, you click it, and it opens up an Internet Explorer window. If you are not logged in, it takes you to the login page, and the page is a Hotmail branded page as the referring URL is mail.live.com instead of outlook.com. Remember, this is all being triggered from clicking a mailto: link. So the URL in the address bar, even though the logging in process, still contains the email address that I am going to be sending to.

After you finish logging in, you get an error page. The compose part of the URL is still in the address bar, as well as the email address you were supposed to be sending an email to. When in the Hotmail interface, a compose page is opened up with the email address from the mailto: link inside of the To: box.

As far as the error page, it seems to be a standard error page.

Okay, so above you see a general error message. It says that Outlook has a problem, but is really an error from what I have seen, as I have tested this multiple times before writing this post.

Trying to send a report to Microsoft is a total fail. I'm begin serious. When you get this error page, you get a link under the button to go back to Outlook to send a report to Microsoft. I wish you could tell them more information, but it is not good at all. Basically, you click to get a report, select your problem, and send away. By select your problem, I'm talking about catorgories. You can't tell them the specific problem you are having. The following screenshots should show you what I mean. Sorry, no videos right now. I have to weak of hardware to get any decent hardware.

As you can see from the 3 images above, I clicked the link, selected the bullet with the problem, and then selected "submit." After clicking that, I get a thank you page. The major problem with this is that I didn't even type in my specific problem. So now I am making this blog post not only to tell all of you the bug, but to maybe catch the attention of the Outlook.com team. I hope they read this, as I truely want to make their product better. Otherwise, I wouldn't be reporting this bug.

If you can, you can help by tweeting this post to @outlook on twitter. You can do so by using the native share buttons, the Disqus comments embed via the star button, or via the addtoany share widget in the box below the post and comments. While your doing that, let me know of your thoughts in the comments below.