hello everybody and welcome back to another video now in today's episode we're going to be taking a look at MSN premium the spiritual successor to MSN gold which we took a look at in this video well okay not really that was just a 24 karat gold special edition of MSN no big deal right but no MSN premium is a service that I was actually really surprised to find out Microsoft still offers in the year 2021 you may remember a little while ago we took a look at MSN Explorer or at least some of the HTML files that make up the program and that was the version that came bundled with Windows XP and what that was is it was a program that you would use with your MSN subscription to browse the web and check email though you could also use it without an MSN subscription now Microsoft didn't just kill off MSN Explorer after that in fact they've been continually releasing new versions ever since and the newest version is still available today and it works on Windows 10 and you can get it through subscribing to either MSN dialup or MSN premium Now MSN dialup is well you can probably tell by the name it is a dialup service kind of like AOL or Net Zero and you can buy it but you have to buy it from the Microsoft store and it costs $179.95 a year and that's with saving 33% if you want to get it monthly it costs $21.95 a month to get dialup service 56k dialup now MSN premium is the other offering which is actually cheaper than MSN dial if you can believe that this just allows you to use MSN Explorer and a couple of other services that are bundled in here with your existing internet connection and because of that it is cheaper it's $9.95 uh a month if we go here and uh if you want to get it yearly you'll save 177% and pay $99.95 a year but what really surprised me is the fact that this still exists in 2021 because a lot of the stuff that is offered in here that's bundled with MSN premium you can get in some cases just with Windows it's already bundled with Windows and if not there are lowcost or even free Alternatives so what would you get with MSN premium well you're going to get computer wide security software Advanced fishing filter technology popup guard and multiple email accounts now Advanced fishing filter technology if you're talking about like a program that will warn you if you're going to a fishing website or a potential fishing website with like a popup that's usually bundled with antivirus programs nowadays when you're saying computer wide security software you're definitely talking about anti virus and anti mower software and there are a plethora of free and very lowcost offerings and even Windows itself nowadays comes bundled with a free antivirus program so we're going to see what computer wide security software that MSN premium has once we get into it the other things are popup guard and multiple email accounts now pop-up guard if your browser doesn't already have some sort of like popup blocking technology you could very easily get a browser extension that blocks popups and multiple email accounts I mean how many free email providers are there nowadays you got Gmail Microsoft has outlook.com and multiple email accounts there's nothing stopping you from making as many of them as you want and in some cases you can just make multiple Alias addresses for one email account so the point I'm trying to make is it's surprising that they're still offering this in 2021 but it seems to me like all this stuff is available elsewhere sometimes bundled with Windows even Microsoft like I said has free anti virus and free email offerings it just kind of begs the question why is MSN premium still a thing but there are people that use this in fact the reason we're able to take a look at this today is thanks to a viewer named Felix who got in contact with me and said that he uses MSN premium he has a subscription to it and he offered to add an email account to his subscription he was able to give MSN premium away to 10 people believe it or not or 10 accounts and he made one for me and he allowed me to to use it and demo it in this video so huge thanks to you Felix for making this video possible now the one thing you're going to get if you haven't already been able to tell with MSN premium or MSN dialup is MSN Explorer and that's kind of going to be one of the major focuses of this video not only just the services that MSN premium offers but also the interface that you're going to be using to browse the web and check your email so I've got the installer right here we're going to just go ahead and run it and you see it says MSN Explorer not premium or anything and if you saw the MSN Explorer XP video this will look very familiar to you because this is a very very similar interface to the installer that we saw in that video even like the MSN logo up here looks identical though it is changed right here this is the new MSN logo and the other difference is it just you know comes up with a Microsoft account sign in uh window here now what's interesting is cuz remember Felix had to create a brand new Microsoft account for me that he just gave MSN premium to through his existing subscription but what's really cool is he was able to use an msn.com email address now this was really surprising to me because if you try to go to the Microsoft Account creation site here this is if you want to create a new account the only domains you can choose from are outlook.com and hotmail.com I thought they had retired the msn.com domain years ago because if you're not aware of B basically Microsoft went through multiple rebrands of what is now known as outlook.com so it started with hotmail.com when they purchased Hotmail in 1996 or 1997 then they changed to msn.com live.com and now outlook.com now they've kept hotmail.com around all these years and obviously outlook.com is the newest one but msn.com you're not able to use anymore like I said I thought they retired that domain years ago obviously if you still had an existing MSN account you could use that without outlook.com without any problems but making a brand new email account I didn't think that was possible but it is through MSN premium and the first thing that it has you do is you have to sign the agreements so you just basically I mean you would read through these agreements we're obviously going to read through every single one of these here in in total detail but you can see that it opens up and and just the design of this installer is really interesting because it does not fit in with the regular Windows 10 design language at all I mean it kind of fits in with Windows Vista and windows 7's design language a little bit I mean these are kind of arrowy looking is buttons if that makes any sense but I think if anything this looks uh very close to the installer we saw in the XP video so this is the Microsoft Services agreement that you have to agree to and we're going to go with the custom installation option so we can choose what it is we're going to be installing so you've got MSN Explorer and you've got designer email whatever this is enhance your email messages with stationary photos and visual effects you've also got Microsoft Office Outlook connector which we don't have Microsoft Outlook installed so it's not going to allow us to to do that and right here it says the estimated time to download is 9 minutes over a high-speed connection or 81 minutes over a dialup connection so I wonder what they're considering a high-speed connection because it's not going to take 9 minutes for me to download a 33.33 megabyte file or file archive but we'll see how long it takes here so we're going to click on next it asks us to insert the latest msnc CD which we don't have so we're just going to click next so it's going to download everything oh it's playing some music in the background check that out oh dang this is some like elevator music right here man I don't what other installers have like background music oh boy I know I'm going to get some comments for this one look I know there are other installers out there that have background music in fact some of them are really detailed think about command and Conquer you guys ever insult Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 or Yuri Revenge yeah those are some pretty detailed and very immersive installation experiences but it's been a while since I've seen an installer that has had background music and things like that anyways back to the video yeah that was totally not 9 minutes so but that's like that leads me to believe that this interface probably hasn't been updated in a while so okay it installed MSN Explorer and designer email it tells us you know open to install additional features use the control panel option programs and features so this is I mean programs and features was a Windows Vista thing it is still a thing in Windows 10 but it's not the primary interface that Microsoft wants you to use at least so this is if you want to add uh you know additional like if you didn't install designer email for example and you want to add it later on you can go through here so we're going to click on finish you must restart your computer all right we will do just that and of course it wouldn't be a Windows 10 video without Windows 10 needing to do some updates so we'll be back in hopefully not a day all right so we've restarted we've got an MSN icon on the desktop let's double click on it do you want the MSN butterfly on the start menu so you can quickly access internet and email now this is interesting because Windows 10's start menu this is probably talking about like the you know like in XP and Vista you've got like internet and email up at the very top left Windows 10 doesn't have that anymore so it's probably just going to pin it to the right side here we'll say yes and this will make and explore your default web browser okay so we'll do that and we've got a signin page here now it looks like it hasn't pinned it so you can see here nothing has been pinned to the start menu at all obviously it's not going to be able to pin anything up here because it's the way that the start menu is designed and and laid out now so we're going to sign into my account here so we'll click on sign in okay I got a signed that was real you got this nice music and then it just ask me to enter my password again okay we'll do that there we go oh my gosh okay good morning Michael dang I like the sounds so the first thing it's going to do is ask us to set up fishing filter which is recommended to have it on and it just says it warns you if the website you are visiting might be impersonating another website which is exactly what I thought it was going to do so we'll click okay okay so we've got you can see over here we've got our inbox we've got the stock market Market we'll definitely be checking that out later on we've got links photos you've got Bing search up here and over here you've got an address bar you know this is kind of your web browser part basically what this is is it is a combination type program so this is where you can browse the web check your email uh check your stocks which you can obviously do from your web browser but it's like a little widget over here uh you've got very easy access to Bing your address book calendar you can click on this and it will take you oh just takes you to your outlook uh calendar at outlook. live.com so this will pull up my calendar here so it's not like an individual program now from what I've looked at up here the majority of these icons really just take you to parts of msn.com they're not like small little applets or anything like that some of them are but most of them like if you go to favorites here this is one of the little applets so I can add things to favorites so we'll say like let's say we want to add this to my favorites we'll click go okay so now when I click on this um I've got a a a link to this page right here so this is just like favorites or bookmarks in Firefox or Microsoft Edge or Chrome so this is your little menu there Bing will obviously just take you to Bing next up is mail and more and this reminds me of Outlook Express on Windows XP if you guys ever used that this will probably look pretty familiar to you just the layout of it though this is a little bit more colorful you got some blues going on here very very nice some little animations here it's currently checking for email we have just one email here this is the welcome to MSN premium email so it says as a valuable MSN premium member we're pleased to welcome you to the latest version of MSN premium here are some of the convenient features you've got tabed browsing button groups Advanced security and safety find out more about the Arsenal of programs and services available to help fortify your computer safety from unwanted pop-ups emails viruses adwar and spyware we'll go ahead and make this a little bit larger here optimize your time with easy and convenient access to useful Microsoft tools experience the power of Bing right from MSN explorers dashboard yes the power of Bing everybody it's a power you don't want to live without Bing is as we all know the most Superior search engine ever and it is wonderful that they have integrated that right into emson Explorer uh it's got a spell checker no way dude it's got a spell checker that's like the thing in Microsoft Word and open office and lib office and like uh Google Docs um pretty much every uh text writing tool out there okay but still spell checker is useful photo email integration with one drive okay now you've got the MSN Member Center which allows you to view you know your membership help and support MSN settings all that good stuff and yeah so honestly I mean like I said it's just kind of surprising that they act like all this stuff is so amazing when they literally offer it for free and they're saying so much about spell checker here like spell checker in bold and it's like oh my gosh it's so amazing but like you can get that in you know Google Docs which obviously is not like a Microsoft thing but I think office online uh which I believe is free I mean that has spell checker but there are other offerings that do a lot of this stuff so let's actually send an email here so we're going to open up the new message uh window here so I can type in you know my uh YouTube email address here and we'll say subject test and we'll say hello everybody this email is being typed from MSN Explorer running on Windows 10 so I can add some emoticons here or emojis but these look these look just these are like the MSN Messenger emoticons here so we can just add some of these here birthday cake I mean honestly I'm getting a sense of like Nostalgia here because this is very very similar I mean just these seeing these emoticons this layout kind of reminds me of MSN Messenger a little bit I personally never used MSN Explorer I never had an MSN dialup or premium subscription so I never used this interface in particular but uh I have used Outlook Express before and this kind of reminds me of Outlook Express and uh so we'll just we'll just send this message here your message is on its way okay so if I go to my YouTube email inbox here we'll pull that up okay that's interesting we got this thing from the outlook.com team please sign into your outlook.com account oh it looks like it just came through to my YouTube email to continue sending messages please sign in and validate your outlook.com account okay so you can now since this is a regular Microsoft account you can sign in to the regular like here's the same email inbox just on outlook.com so I got to verify this capture here so this is outlook.com and this is MSN mail now this message doesn't show probably because it's not a I mean it's kind of set up as an actual email like it was sent from if we hover over here it says it was sent from that msn.com email address but my guess is this wasn't like this is just like a local email that's already included with this program here now what's interesting is check this out up here on August 17th 2021 Outlook will no longer support the Internet Explorer 11 browser switched to the new Microsoft Ed so that is an indication right there that the embedded browser they're using in MSN Explorer is Internet Explorer 11 or it's based on ie1 I'm kind of surprised they haven't switched over to Microsoft Edge yet but hopefully they'll do that before August 17th or else you won't be able to use outlook.com though if you're just using this interface you'll be totally fine and just to show you here is the message that I sent from MSN Explorer and you can see it showed up and it displays even the emoticons here display totally fine now if you haven't noticed we've got this tabbed interface up here now to open up a new tab you can click this button right here and say I want to go to the address book I can click on that and here is my address book now this is one of the other things that is I mean this is an embedded page uh that's you know just included with MSN Explorer this is not anything on outlook.com now the calendar is if I make another Tab and go to calendar this will take you to the outlook.com calendar I'm kind of surprised they don't have a page like this for the address book here with the calendar because this is I mean you can just get this by opening up Microsoft Edge and speaking of Microsoft Edge that's what this button right here does this just opens up a Microsoft Edge window and you can see it's the old Edge logo so this is going to surprising like I'm honestly going to take a guess that this client has not been updated in a while because I would think they would change this Edge logo to the new one just to verify that let's go to about MSN so this is version 11.75 here's the entire I mean you got this whole version string here and there's no copyright data or anything aside from 1993 International correct spell spelling correction system copyright 1993 so that's the spell check program they were so proud of in that email now this doesn't mean it's from 1993 but it's copyrighted from 1993 the American Heritage dictionary of the English language Third Edition copyright 1992 I guess that's the dictionary they're using for spell check now just to okay so here's that dictionary right here the American Heritage dictionary Third Edition right and we scroll down here okay down to the information the product details published on June 12th 199 4 and Amazon you can still buy this from Amazon if you want you can get a paperback for $632 probably used or maybe yeah buy used so the dictionary for the spell check is from 1992 or that's the copyright did it was published in what '94 94 that's how has that not been updated in all these years I mean if they would update the dictionary they would have to put that in here right they would say oh it's the fifth edition now or they would change to a different dictionary that's newer wow that is really really surprising okay so let's click on more info here oh that's a great sign can't reach this B make sure the web address of I mean this is a like this is I was just at this web page why is this not let's just try to go out of here members center. msn.com okay so whatever page that was embedded like the link that was embedded in the about window doesn't work oh never mind it does okay oh okay so it was released so the last version was published on August 24th 2020 that's when this was released and it has minor bug fixes but before that the the last version was January 21st 2020 so they're publishing I mean you got one version in 2018 one version in 2019 and two versions in 2020 and there's not been a version in 2021 yet the latest version had some minor bug fixes the version before that moved the stocks bar to the dashboard I guess that's this over here okay so there's like TFA here so two Factor off so that's good nested groups functionality new users mail box provision from MSN Explorer using rest API feed options for the new tab page added top stories to the new tab page as a valuable MSN member we're pleased to welcome you to the latest version of MSN Explorer here are some highlights okay so web route secure anywhere for MSN is the anti-spy protection like that's the the anti virus program so they're using web rout okay fishing filter doesn't say what uh like who offers this so let's check out like let's go to safety here so you've got Microsoft Defender now this was interesting cuz when I clicked on this you see this Defender win8 it's this is like a short link here but it redirects you to the page about the built-in Microsoft Defender antivirus with Windows 10 so this isn't anything unique to MSN Explorer because this just comes with like you know Windows Defender you know Windows security here you click on this here it is this is Windows security uh that comes with Windows 10 so this might have before this might have been like it might have opened up my guess is it would probably open up Windows Defender with Windows 8 that's my guess because well Windows Defender got it start with Windows Vista though it wasn't really that great back then then you had Microsoft Security Essentials that was a separate download and then windows