Outlook Express was great and we used it followed by Windows Live Mail which was also great until MS dropped it and replaced it with their joke of an email program named Windows Mail which had no facility to import messages or contacts.
It appeared to be nothing more than a plan to get users to buy Office, which we did on eBay for next to nothing.
Sorry Microsoft but you didn’t actually manage to scam us.
outlook.com is also just one of the addresses that can be used with Microsoft based mail addresses eg @hotmail.com, @msn.com, @live.com (though most are now reserved domain name there are some legacy user names with live.com), passport.com & passport.net (passport are legacy so no new mail addresses can be generated with those). Some even allowed country suffixes eg hotmail.com.au or live.com.au.
The MS Outlook help section states “Microsoft offers 15 GB of email storage space per free Outlook.com account. Microsoft 365 Family and Microsoft 365 Personal subscribers get 50 GB of space”.
If using the Outlook program it creates a storage file on the computer, in versions up to 2016 it was with an extension of .pst, in the newer versions it is now .ost. There is a special one with the extension .nst which is for group emails and conversations.
You can use one of many free web mail services or free (or cheap) desktop mail clients. Or you could quite cheaply buy Office (which apparently you did) and get much more functionality as well as a mail client. You may be right that Live Mail has been deprecated, I haven’t checked, or perhaps something went wrong with your installation. I know it’s in your job description to see scams in every corner but this one escapes me.
They changed the way mail is delivered (they use Exchange servers now for emails), there is a situation if Live was still installed when first updated to Win 10 that it would remain operating for a period. This does have an end date but I no longer have the email that advised how long this would be supported. Outlook Express & MS Office up to version 2010 had many years ago a small program added (Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector) that allowed emails using MS hotmail etc accounts to be successfully used but this has now been deprecated and Outlook Express no longer is supported by the online mail servers. This also applies to Office Outlook programs up to Office 2010. Live mail will continue to work with non Exchange servers eg Gmail, Yahoo mail and similar until they make some major change that breaks the way they currently serve email.
The new Mail app (free to have and use if you so wish) however uses the MS Exchange servers online to send and receive emails as does Office 2013, 2016 and Microsoft 365. Thunderbird also happily accommodates hotmail, outlook, live etc addresses as it has MS Exchange support and you can import your contacts and old emails into it from a pst or ost file though it can be a bit of a challenge.
Mail while it does support outlook mail is not the same as the Outlook programs and therefore old emails and contacts from .pst or .ost files cannot be imported into it. If you add your contacts into the Contacts app they will be available to the Mail app.
My understanding is that they are separate and independent services but, yes, they are both owned by Microsoft.
‘outlook.com’ is an online-hosted mail service. It can be accessed using the Microsoft Outlook desktop client but it can also potentially be accessed using other mail client software (such as Thunderbird) and it can be accessed via a web browser.
I am not qualified to comment on all the differences between the services but, in my observation, a lot of companies who are using outlook.com are using their own domain. So it is a service offered by and operated by Microsoft but to the outside world it isn’t really relevant that it is operated by Microsoft.
Considering that it is operated by Microsoft, to the outside world outlook.com is relatively pain free.
Unless authorised, you won’t be able to use standard mail protocols at all, so you won’t be able to use Thunderbird. (Another reason for this is that if 2FA is set mandatory by your administrator then the web interface knows how to deal with that and interact with the Microsoft Authenticator app but Thunderbird, for example, does not, and, regardless, outlook.com simply won’t allow it to authenticate.)
When originally purchased by Microsoft it was kept as hotmail.com, MS later renamed the service as Outlook.com a further iteration was the Passport service (it was about international appeal) and the Live mail service.
All these led to the various email domain names such as hotmail.com. If you try to login these days it all redirects to login.live.com.
