Outlook Alternative: Business Email That Does Not Route Through Someone Else’s Cloud

For third-party and custom-domain accounts, independent testing says yes. Reporting by heise online and XDA Developers found that the new Outlook passes your account credentials to Microsoft’s servers and syncs mail, calendar and contacts into the Microsoft Cloud, on both OAuth and IMAP connections — because the new client is a wrapper around Microsoft’s cloud services rather than a traditional mail program that fetches mail directly. If your business runs email on its own domain, that means a copy of it sits somewhere you did not choose.

Yes, and that is the point — Liberation Email speaks standard IMAP, so Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Android and Windows mail all connect directly to our servers with no bridge application in between. If you would rather avoid the new Outlook client entirely after reading the reporting above, any other IMAP client works exactly the same way.

Liberation Email is $1.95 per mailbox per month on your own domain. Microsoft sells business email inside per-user subscription bundles, so the comparison depends on which bundle you would otherwise buy and how many of its apps you actually use. The structural difference is that you buy mailboxes here rather than seats — ten people who only need email cost ten mailboxes, not ten software suites.

The free consumer service is. Liberation Email is paid and ad-free, and we do not scan, sell or share your mail, or use it to train anything. That is the trade being made: a free mailbox is funded somehow, and a $1.95 mailbox is funded by you paying $1.95.

Yes, free. We migrate mail, folders, contacts and calendar from Outlook, Microsoft 365 or any IMAP provider, and nothing is deleted at the old provider until you are satisfied everything arrived. Your address stays the same if you already own the domain — only the servers behind it change.

Liberation Email is end-to-end encrypted, so message contents are not readable in transit, and it is hosted on servers we own and operate in the United States. Standard Microsoft consumer and business mail is encrypted in transit and at rest but is not end-to-end encrypted by default, which is why the sync-to-cloud behaviour of the new client matters.

That is the risk of tying email to a platform account. An Outlook.com address lives inside a Microsoft account that may also govern your files, sign-ins and devices, so a restriction can take the mailbox with it. A Liberation mailbox is a mailbox on your own domain — nothing else depends on it, and because you own the domain you can always point it somewhere else.