Making your email experience as fast as possible is a goal shared across the Outlook.com team—
Outlook.com is hosted from multiple datacenters across the world, which provides fault tolerance, load balancing, and performance advantages. Our goal is to set up your Outlook.com account in datacenters that provide you with the best performance. In the U.S. and Europe, that means we will set up your account in datacenters that are in the region where you reside. Historically, we have determined these locations based on the country you selected as your place of residence when you created the account.
But in a world where migration is increasingly common, relying on you to manually keep that place of residence information up to date doesn’t make sense. Our datacenter capacity is also increasing, providing more opportunities to host your data closer to where you are located. Accordingly, we made updates that improve our ability to maintain your Outlook.com data closer to you with greater accuracy.
When you create a new Outlook.com account, we now determine the appropriate datacenters automatically, rather than relying on the country of residence stored in your account profile. So, if you are physically located in the U.S. when setting up your Outlook.com account, your email will be stored in the U.S. Similarly, if you are in Europe when setting up your account, your email will be stored in Europe.
We are also making Outlook.com smart enough to automatically move your account to closer datacenters when the service determines over a period of time that you have changed the region of your primary residence and performance would be improved. For example, if you set up an Outlook.com account in Spain and later relocate your residence to the U.S., your account will be migrated to U.S. datacenters to optimize your access.
Note that we will not continuously move data back and forth between regions every time you travel abroad—
We’re always working to ensure you have the best and fastest experience when using our service. Give us your feedback and ask your questions at the Outlook.com UserVoice site.
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