Windows Live Custom Domains was released out of beta around June 27th. I followed this product through its beta test cycle (I was a beta tester) and thought it was pretty cool. To my surprise the released version is free. Not a free beta test version... not a free trial period... this is the full blown final release v1 product and its free forever.
Whats this all about? If you own a domain like mywidgets.com you can register your domain with Live Custom Domains and you end up with a Microsoft Passport that you can use anywhere that a normal Passport account works (just like MSN or Hotmail accounts) and your email is hosted at Hotmail.com. So you can go in and setup an account for sales@mywidgets.com and service@mywidgets.com and bob@mywidgets.com and whatever you want. You can setup Unlimited Email accounts! It appears as though these are all hosted on Hotmail as a standard free email account, meaning you see the advertisements and get the tag lines inserted in your email, etc. But I assume you could associate your sales@mywidgets.com account with an upgraded paid Hotmail account which will give you more features and remove the ads. Keep in mind that I don't believe Microsoft supports SMTP/POP3 protocols on any plans.
How does this work technically? They are not selling you a domain. You must already own the domain and have it registered somewhere like Enom, Go Daddy, etc. You go into your registrar and configure your domain's MX record to point to the Hotmail mail servers. The Live Custom Domains website tells you how to do everything and will check the DNS entry to make sure you have it right.
Another cool feature is their Open Membership feature that allows you to let anyone sign up for a free Hotmail email account under your domain. For example, lets say you own your-organization.com. You can allow anyone to sign up for an email account under that domain. You have some management capabilities on these accounts. So, for example, you can throw out someone you don't want under your domain. All these users will have the full capabilities of a free Hotmail account (spam filters, virus scanning, etc), hosted by Hotmail under your domain all for free. I think this is really cool.
A couple final thoughts... Microsoft does not support SMTP/POP3 so you have to use a browser or Outlook/Outlook Express with "http mode" to access your mailbox. I also don't see any way to consolidate multiple accounts under one Passport. For example, maybe I want bob@mywidgets.com to be able to log into Hotmail and be able to send and receive email for sales@mywidgets.com, support@mywidgets.com and other accounts under the domain. With this in mind, I believe you can do both these things on Yahoo. However, none of this would be free on Yahoo.
I think that Windows Live Custom Domains is a really cool product for anyone who needs a place to host their private domain's email accounts. Being free makes it even better.
