Microsoft is caught up in a privacy storm after it admitted it read the Hotmail inbox of a blogger while pursuing a software leak investigation.
On Thursday, the firm acknowledged it read the anonymous blogger's emails in order to identify an employee it suspected of leaking information.
Microsoft owns Hotmail, a free e-mail service now called Outlook.com.
John Frank, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, said it took "extraordinary actions in this case".
While the search was technically legal, he added Microsoft would consult outside counsel in the future.
Legal actionsMicrosoft's actions came to light this week as part of a legal case by US prosecutors against an ex-Microsoft employee, Alex Kibalko, who was a Russian native based in the company's Lebanon office.
In 2012, Microsoft had been alerted to the fact that the blogger, whose identity was kept anonymous in the court papers, had been given some stolen lines of code from the not-yet-released Windows 8 operating system.
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