As Office 365 continues to become Microsoft's core productivity software platform, the premium, ad-free version of outlook.com is being shutdown with its features folded into Office 365 as of today. That means the only way to get an ad-free cloud-email service from Microsoft will be to pony up for the dearer Office 365.

Back in the day, an email outage at Hotmail/MSN/Outlook.com would have been a big deal. But I'm not sure it's such a big deal these days. However, Outlook is in the throes of an outage that was first reported this morning on Aussie Outages. I'm not sure too many Lifehacker readers will still be running their Hotmail accounts - maybe you've kept one for the odd MySpace request you get - but the outage seems to be localised to Australian and Japanese customers.

Microsoft seems very keen on its Clutter tool for automatically filing email right now. Not only is it being added to Office 365, a version of it is also being incorporated into its free Outlook.com web-based email service.

Today, Microsoft announced that it's adding advanced filtering rules to Outlook.com, as well as in-line replies, easier access to messaging options, and the ability to undo email move operations.

If you're a fan of Outlook.com but still use a few other accounts for mail -- like Gmail or Yahoo -- you can import your mail and manage it from Outlook.com's awesome interface.

Microsoft's Outlook.com email service has some nifty features (including flexible disposable email addresses). The latest addition? It's now directly integrated with Skype, so you can make voice or video calls direct from your browser.

Microsoft's Outlook.com webmail service already offers a handy option to set up multiple aliases routing to the same address. Now it has an additional useful feature: the ability to create disposable addresses by adding a "+modifier" to the name.

Today's best apps and services for search, email, music streaming and to-do management weren't always number one. Some of the apps we loved a long time ago are still out there, updating, adding features and keeping their fans happy even if they don't have what it takes to thrill tech bloggers or stay in the limelight. Here are a few of those old dogs you may remember, and some of the new tricks that make them worth a fresh look.

One of the drawbacks of Microsoft's Hotmail replacement Outlook.com was that if you wanted to use something other than its web interface, email clients could only access messages using POP3 or Microsoft's EAS protocol. A lot more devices and services use IMAP, and now so does Outlook.com.

We've been promised Skype integration into Microsoft's Outlook.com webmail platform since December last year. Today, the feature finally fully rolled out for six countries, but unfortunately Australia isn't one of them.

We've been quite taken with Microsoft's Outlook.com webmail ever since the first previews for the service appeared in early August. What's next for Outlook.com? A gradual migration of all Hotmail users and an integration of Skype.

We were quite impressed with the revamped Outlook.com service, and Microsoft continues to enhance it. An Android app to access the service has been introduced, along with one-click archiving and an enhanced set of keyboard shortcuts.

The new Outlook.com has a stack of handy features, but for some Australian users it also has a major nuisance: a pointless nineMSN bar promo bar at the top of the screen, serving no useful purpose, wasting lots of vertical screen real estate and undermining the effectiveness of the redesign. A fix is apparently on the way.

Dear Lifehacker, Like many people I suffer from a swamped inbox. I receive many newsletters and daily deal offers which are often only on interest on the day they're sent. What I'd love to do is to take those kinds of emails and automatically delete them if they're unread after 24 or 48 hours. I don't want to unsubscribe, but I'd love them to disappear after that time. Any ideas? I use Gmail, and there's usually a solution! Thanks, Mail Manager

Need to create a more (or less) professional alias to use your new Outlook email account? It's incredibly easy.