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Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)
- ggm 2y agoThe lack of tech documentation and the fact they obfuscate or even don't provide "don't do that" options goes very strongly into older Microsoft dark patterns "for your convenience" They did this with backup. Want to backup to local media? Why would you do that when we will back it up in one drive which you must pay for.
- pjmlp 2y agoUnfortunely many business units from the organization seem to never have changed that much from the old ways.
- pestatije 2y agoone step closer to finally merge hotmail and outlook together
- sirolimus 2y agoThis is over a year old news.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- nunobrito 2y agoSame "brading" as we see on Discord "servers" which basically all run on the company side. Now there is really no way of verifying what kind of access they do with your personal email data.
- ddmf 2y agoThe amount of issues this has caused as a sysadmin - no, don't open new outlook, open the new old outlook. ah bugger it, add to intune - required uninstall.
- albertopv 2y agoNew Outlook is 100% shit. So many features missing. Even adding attachments is sick. Of course, given it's an embedded web app.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah if you have O365 it always tries to goad you into uploading stuff into onedrive and sharing a link instead of just attaching stuff. Very annoying because the process for externals to sign into sharepoint (which onedrive is just a wrapper for) is terrible.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoBreak them up. We need revised antitrust laws.
- b112 2y agoI think yes, and it really boils down to role separation. For everything. An example being cable companies. They should have no capability to own TV stations, media creators, news companies, the list goes on. Backbone is backbone, be it an internet connection, or a TV/video feed. Back to Microsoft you can make an OS, or you can make apps, but not both. An OS being a 'backbone'. Applies to Google. "Search" vs "Ads". Backbone versus 'stuff on top'. Really, sadly, there are cases where co-mingled stuff makes perfect sense. But bad actors are why we can't have nice things. I wonder, there have always been jokes about how the world would be a paradise without lawyers, but would that be more MBAs in the 21st? Whether cars, or computers, or even the ladder I recently bought that is junk, it really all comes down to MBAs. Engineers input "that's not acceptable quality", and MBAs just tromp all over that. MBAs, the "we can't have nice things" people.
- oarsinsync 2y agoHow would you suggest splitting up a heavily vertically integrated company, like eg Apple? Does Google search become a paid subscription product in your vision of separation of search vs ads?
- b112 2y agoCompanies have been split up before, and such acts are nuanced and often company specific. One logical thought is that existing companies would be handled differently than newer companies venturing where they should not. I have no detail on what precisely need be done, typically that's where experts chime in. And no, that does not invalidate my opinion. If for example, I get food poisoning regularly from the food I buy at a supermarket, then something must be done. The problem must be fixed. The food must be rendered safe. Which means "food producers must provide safe food" is a sensible response, and then food experts enact. So back to Apple and Google? They're broken, as all synergistic orgs are. And yes this needs to be dealt with. But you're missing something more important. I did not specify only them, but just general division for all corporate entities. This is much larger than Google or Apple or cable companies. Playing devils advocate, the real problem is that such solutions enacted solely on the US stage only won't work. Instead it will simply shift power to externals. You'd need to get most countries on the planet to comply, else a competitive edge would be lost in the US.
- senectus1 2y agoits so, so very bad. but... if you want co-pilot... you have to have it. All my exec's and their PA's want it. but.. they also want Offline access to their mail. For some reason its MY FAULT they cant have both. so very very shit.
- wkat4242 2y agoThis is not entirely true, there are some copilot for O365 features in the old outlook. Like the "summarise these emails with copilot" and the "draft with copilot". The chatbot interface where you can ask basic questions is still missing in the old Outlook though. But you can use the web interface at https://copilot.microsoft.com https://copilot.microsoft.com to access your emails too. Other than that I agree, the new outlook is terrible, and it's ridiculous that it doesn't support offline email. It's really nothing more but a wrapper for the web interface. I'm not a huge fan of copilot either. It's not nearly as capable as they try to make it look. Unfortunately all the top dogs in our company are riding the AI hype train so they must all have it.
- canistel 2y agoMeanwhile, Thunderbird is rolling out MS Exchange capability by v130 (which I am hoping must be very soon)
- wossab 2y agoOutlook has been falling apart at the seams for a while now. But I cannot find a email client that supports multiple exchange servers and parses calendar invites in a way that's compatible with Teams. I'm the first to jeet Outlook if Thunderbird will do this but I'm also open to suggestions here.
- rightbyte 2y agoIt is a losing proposition to try to deal with compatibility between different MS products. Especially moving SaaS targets you can't control.
- hetman 2y agoThunderbird seems to run everything in a single thread, something I only noticed when I tried to sync some large mailing list folders and the UI basically became unusable. I was really hoping to switch to it before this cropped up.
- _joel 2y agoI've paid for and been a happy user of https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/ when I've needed to in the past.
- whitehexagon 2y agoI just this week lost access to my hotmail/outlook account from Thunderbird, although I'm on a much older version. Sounds like MS dropped POP3 support, probably for my own 'safety and security'. How long has that been an industry standard though, shame. Anyway a good trigger to drop another ad focused company, at least that is what it seems when I was forced to use the web interface today.
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- daft_pink 2y agoare we just waiting for excel to exhibit this behavior shortly?
- MaxikCZ 2y agoI needed to send categorized and annotated batch of pictures (150MB) to a client, and for some reason I decided to drop the pics into excel sheet (allowing me to nicely support them with data etc). The client complained that they use web version of office 360, and that version doesnt allow to open excel files bigger than 100MB. I cant even.
- beretguy 2y ago… finish a sentence.
- dax_ 2y agoWe're already going there, the new Python integration for Excel is cloud-only - the Python is not executed locally. It wouldn't surprise me if more and more features in Excel going forward will be the same way.
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- rochak 2y ago[flagged]
- Neil44 2y agoThey've recently renamed Outlook to Outlook (classic). So you can see which way the wind is blowing on this. Outlook (new) is still missing tons of big features and the UI sucks.
- larodi 2y agoOutlook new is missing one fundamental feature which is automation. This blob of html can not be programmed unlike predecessors for more 15 years. It is so easy to instantiate and use old outlook that I really fail to understand what is their endgame with this killing of a top and well respected product.
- skipnup 2y agoI switched to doing most of the automation in power automate This of course only works with exchange afaik, but why else would I use outlook.
- alt227 2y agoI think the article has it correct, its their way of forcing all users to have their emails stored and scraped by Microsoft, no matter the provider.
- 486sx33 2y agoNeed more free training data! The most annoying part is the times outlook automatically updated to new outlook, of which I was not notified and could not decline. I guess it vacuumed up all my email data those times, even though I “reverted” to legacy outlook
- hetman 2y agoNot to mention the rather consistent crashing. I see it across multiple systems which makes me wonder if the developers even use it themselves.
- dax_ 2y agoI will keep using "classic" for as long as possible. This trend to turn everything into painfully slow web apps is really getting on my nerves. As an example, I use quick steps very frequently to categorize emails. In classic Outlook, I click the button and the email is moved immediately - in the new Outlook it has a ~1 second delay until the email is moved and I can move the next one. Takes so long to get through my inbox.
- tcfhgj 2y agoWinoMail is a good replacement for the Mail app, in case anyone is using it and is being shoved to using the Outlook App
- 29athrowaway 2y agoThey move it to the cloud where it becomes AI food.
- omega3 2y agoEvery email program attempts to expand its features until it can no longer efficiently send email. Those programs which resist this expansion are eventually replaced by ones which cannot.
- BodyCulture 2y agoSo like IMAP?
- alt227 2y agoLike IMAP, except Microsoft downloads and stores all your folders on their servers, even if your email provider is not Microsoft.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah so it's nothing like IMAP really.
- alt227 2y agoId say its like IMAP with a middleman who reads all your emails for you first!
- BodyCulture 2y agoOkay, so this happens not only for MS mail accounts, thanks for this! I probably could not even imagine that they are basically copying private data to their servers! I don’t understand why people are still using their products, I am using Linux since many years and see no problem at all with that. Plus Apple for phone, but not sure about their privacy promises…
- BodyCulture 2y agoThe website is forcing me to disable ad blocking, but I am just using Orion browser and am happy with it, so can not see the content.
- benterix 2y agoHave you tried disabling JS? It works for me on most sites, including this one.
- blacklight 2y agoIf you still use Outlook for ANYTHING then it's self-inflicted and well deserved.
- beretguy 2y agoOr employer inflicted and you install libreoffice.
- Alifatisk 2y agoMy worst fear is if Microsoft decides to fiddle with Hotmail/outlook and make it into something I have to pay for. I've had my email address for 15+ years, it's going to be a impossible task to change email address everywhere.
- kuon 2y agoYeah, that's why I always tell people to buy a domain for email, so they can move it where they want at any time. Hopefully, it becomes more and more standard with email providers. But when you have a long history, the best you can do is setup a redirection and change email address at the few places where it is really important (bank, google/microsoft/apple account, ...).
- appendix-rock 2y agoI mean…do you plan on outlasting Hotmail? 15 years isn’t that long. Your choices are probably to do it proactively or to do it when your back is against the wall. There is no third option. I’m not going to be like one of those insane nerds advocating for running your own mail server, but if you care about email address longevity, mail at one’s own domain seems the only way to actually achieve that. These days, it’s zero effort to use Fastmail or Hey or something to get email at your own domain. They register it for you and everything! The hard bit is, as you say, moving everything. But, again, that’s inevitable.
- skrebbel 2y agoThe worst thing about this, to me, is that Windows Mail client, the one they're discontinuing, is a fantastic piece of software. It's simple, lean, capable, and elegantly designed. It's perfect for a novice computer user to check their email on. The new cloud thing is worse in every way. It confusingly copies your email over from your email provider's servers onto Microsoft's servers, and then shows an ad that looks exactly like an email in the middle of all the emails. In other words, it injects spam, but the spam is special because you can't delete it. Also, it needs to run in a browser for no apparent reason. For anybody currently using Windows Mail, it's a pure downgrade. I understand that a company running a cloud service needs to finance this service, eg with ads, but this doesn't need to be a cloud service at all. It's so extremely backward that I simply can't comprehend how it made it through all the management layers at Microsoft. If all builtin software that comes with Windows turns into a bad, ad-ridden cloud apps then that's just one more reason for people to switch to Chromebooks, right? What's next, ads in Solitaire?¹ I miss the time when Microsoft wanted to make useful software. ¹) At the risk of ruining the joke by explaining it: Microsoft already did this. They removed Solitaire from Windows and replaced it with a terrible Windows Store app which indeed is loaded to the rim with screamy animated banner ads. I assume that the PM responsible for that got promoted to the email team or something.
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoThat time never existed, there were plenty of subgroups inside Microsoft that wanted to make useful software. Plenty of people still in there that do. But it's never been a general policicy of Microsoft that turned into actual culture and actions. Because that would require a general vision in that direction, which would imply we would never have one version out of two of Windows (Me, Vista, 8, 11...) that looks like a prototype. We would not have the mess of UI with thousands of toolkits, the infamous env var windows staying unusable for decades, the right click "more option" in W11 that changes theme mid-flight. We wouldn't have had the awful windows media player that couldn't read anything without a pack of spyware installed in the 90'. Or IE6 being frozen into obsolescence. Or ads in the start menu. Teams file sharing and chat would not suck. Word would not destroy your layout because you move an image on pixel on the left. Access wouldn't produce the most corruptible db ever. The File explorer would not start in 7 seconds randomly in some machines (see last twitter trend), and its search would actually be useful. The wizard to fix your internet issues would have solved a problem at least once. MS would not allow tons of crapware to be installed by 3rd party. Python in the windows store would not have been made non standard. We wouldn't have to wait 2020 to have an upgrade to the terminal. The registry would be self documenting. Skype wouldn't have been destroyed after being bought. You would be able to get to your user directory easily out of the box. Cortana would be useful. Surface wouldn't run to crawl because they would be optimized for their hardware. I can continue like that for hours. Because those are not subtle issues. There are other teams at Microsoft that would never let that happen. The priority of MS is to conquer the market. At some points it meant being a bully. Now it's to pretend to be FOSS BFF. It's always been about getting devs on the platforms, and business on the hook. But at no point in MS history has been ever been, when you at the actual results, making good software. Good software like .Net, AoE 2 or Excel were made by the few of their accidentally amazing team.
- tamrix 2y agoI don't mind the new outlook. The meeting notifications are far less intrusive. You can update a meeting without spamming new emails. The simplified views do 95%of what I use it for. The calendar view is easier to read. Everyone will hate this but whatever, internal company email is dead. It causes more issues than solutions. Phishing, spam, malware, etc. It's legacy tech. The new outlook client is linking it with more modern medium specific communication such as loop, teams, sharepoint online, one drive etc.
- wkat4242 2y ago> Everyone will hate this but whatever, internal company email is dead. It causes more issues than solutions. Phishing, spam, malware, etc. It's legacy tech. Yeah I know, our Microsoft consultants are constantly spamming this "Use Teams not mail" BS. And the "Why are you not using edge yet?" stuff. I really hate the Microsoft approach where every technical person must also push all the marketing drivel. However Teams has a major problem: Discoverability. In Outlook when you communicate a lot you can move your emails to custom folders to find them back easily. In Teams you can't. Every ad-hoc chat opens up some Sharepoint site somewhere and after using Teams for a couple years it means you have thousands of locations where your information could be. It's a huge mess and there is no way to manually categorise this to find back important stuff like you could with email.
- type0 2y agoI know this is anecdata but many Outlook users I spoke with few years ago was wanting this feature to happen. And given how rampant cryptolockers were in those organisations, they're probably joyful about it not being stored locally.
- ratg13 2y agoIf you connect with a provider like Gmail in the article .. your email is still on google’s servers.. modified messages don’t get synchronized back. You can choose to leave your mail on the server with all mail providers. The only difference is that now Microsoft keeps a second copy of all your mails so they can do more AI on your data
- Yaggo 2y agoCan it yet do proper quoting?
- klreaj 2y agoThe MSFT P/E ratio went up from around 10 in 2010 to 37 now. Presumably due to hype strategies like Azure and AI. Why do businesses tolerate the spying and data collection? Is there no industrial espionage? A German university advised researchers not to use Skype due to the possibility of research theft. It's a pretty dangerous game that MSFT is playing here. What goes up can come down.
- Roark66 2y agoNo idea... A current client (a Fortune 500 company worth billions and all of that money is in software developed over 50+ years) is currently migrating to Github... Also Copilot was rolled out to everyone a couple of months ago. So it seems there is zero concern for giving all data to MS and paying through the nose for the privilege... Insanity.
- pndy 2y agoArticle mentions it's "a wrapper around Microsoft's cloud services" but I wonder if is it actually a native application or some electron/chromium embedded framework app?
- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoNew outlook uses the Edge Webview thing, very similar to electron
- thrdbndndn 2y agoOutlook (new) (Windows desktop client) is one of the worst product from MS I've used in recent years. The lack of polishing is staggering. Let's be fair first, it works most of time (I know it's a low bar). And I actually prefer its aesthetics than the Outlook (classic) and Mail app. Now, back to its bugs/issues: 1. Open an email in a search folder will not mark it as read. This is the biggest gripe I have. Since Outlook (new) does not provide any native way to add a label of "unread" on the sidebar, I created a search folder with "select a type = Unread mail" and added it to my favorite. However, it's almost unusable due to the bug mentioned above. 2. You CANNOT search non-ASCII (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, etc.) category (tag). You can add them, (and if you use a, say, Chinese client, the default color categories are literally in Chinese!) but searching these categories (or just click from a tagged email) returns nothing. This fucked me so badly when I categorized 1000+ emails before realizing. 3. The state of the client at various places are often not in sync. For example you may have cleared your unread email already but the icon on taskbar still shows unread dot. Or you opened multiple windows and some say you have 0, some say you have 5. Or within the same window, the inbox sidebar label says 0 but a search folder label for certain condition (say, from certain email address) says otherwise when it's impossible. And there is no refresh button -- so if that happens you have to re-open manually or click a random label and then go back and wish it fixes itself. I'm sure there are lots of others, but these are more than bad enough. I'm genuinely concerned how they can ship a software at this stage, particularly issue 1 and 2 are very easily reproducible and I've reported them multiple times through feedback with only canned reply, and they're still not fixed after months.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoIt's the same with New teams. One of the most upvoted issues in their uservoice/techcomminity/feedback hub/whatever is the ability to set multiple spell check languages. It's only ever the language you have your Teams UI in. Even worse, the date format uses by planner, calendar etc is from that language too. Even if Windows has detailed locale settings, and the MS365 setting also let you set a date format, Teams just ignores it. By the way, did I mention languages other than english are machine-translated and hilariously wrong.
- wasteduniverse 2y ago
- chakintosh 2y agoCan't train your AI if your customers' emails are stored locally.
- kleiba 2y agoFolks, don't complain. You wanted the cloud, you're getting the cloud.
- aNoob7000 2y agoPeople didn't want the cloud. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others wanted everyone in the cloud to get them on the subscription bandwagon. I hope more and more people vote with their wallets and go to other platforms and tools.
- kleiba 2y agoI don't think you're right. People love the benefits they get from the cloud, mostly being able to access data from multiple devices and huge storage capabilities. The downsides are, unfortunately, often overlooked. For non-techies, it is not immediate obvious what the downsides even are, or why they should matter.
- wkat4242 2y agoI never wanted any cloud. I never used a MS account to sign into windows either, which is becoming ever more of a fight.
- kleiba 2y agoNeither did/do I. When I write "you", of course I don't mean you personally. Keep fighting the good fight! What I'm trying to point at is that convenience trumps privacy concerns almost every time for most people. The reasons for that are plentifold.
- beretguy 2y agoThis is my first time hearing we wanted the cloud.
- dghughes 2y agoDidn't Cisco try to revert by putting some cloud back locally and we ended up with Fog computing?
- wkat4242 2y agoWelcome to the Extinguish phase...
- ra120271 2y agoIt's one bad thing to sync all one's email to the their cloud. It's another bad thing to give the cloud the credentials to sync one's email directly. So in theory even if you stop using the client they can still get your email without your knowledge and explicit permission (ie you are not using the client and would reasonably expect they don't have access to new emails). Also the cloud service now have the capability to save then retrieve the credentials in plain text making them a rich target for being compromised.
- 7952 2y agoIts maddening how software doesn't benefit anymore from fast local storage. We have massive inexpensive SSD's sitting empty whilst you wait for a tiny PDF to download.
- gpvos 2y agoAnd when we finally have huge data pipes to our homes and offices.
- kleiba 2y agoThe problem is not that email gets moved to "the cloud" - naturally, email has always lived on somebody's servers. The problem is non-tech people get tricked into doing something they would likely not want if they understood the implications - like, allowing MS to copy all of your existing email from a different account (say, gmail), when all you want is to manage multiple accounts from a single piece of software. This whole "cloud" lingo serves to hide technological realities and privacy implications with the only goal to improve business.
- Gud 2y agoAnd then probing the e-mails, learning everything there is to know about you.
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- trustno2 2y agoWell, it has more Copilot AI stuff baked in, that's what people want nowadays.
- tgv 2y agoSo now Outlook users' emails have two points to leak from? And we all know how good MS' security is. > ... Co-pilot ... Make that three. And beware: > The offloading ... removes the ability for security engineers or researchers to easily inspect what the client is doing
- s_m_r 2y agoFor those looking for a simple, lightweight, and nice-looking mail client, check out Mailspring, It has a free version that satisfies most of your needs.
- bachmeier 2y agoYet another example of why I won't take a consulting job without written permission to upload data to Microsoft's cloud. The client will expect you to use Windows but they want you to promise that you won't share their data with anyone. There's no way to promise "local only" anything if you're using Windows.
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- ashildr 2y agoSo even if your company has its own mailserver everyone is locked out of email if some Microsoft services are down, again. Brilliant.
- sub7 2y agoI have a hotmail account from the 90s and they've made it impossible to use not-Outlook clients to authenticate with IMAP servers - calling it a "bug" that's being "worked on" (for over a year now apparently) Basically trying to push you to paid Exchange/Office365 subscriptions. The more aggro these big tech cos are trying to move you from buying great products to paying for overpriced subscriptions, the closer we get to them trading at their historical PEs (down ~50% from today)
- gloosx 2y agoAh, classic micro$oft ramming their thing down the users throats while they are shouting into the void. Steady market share decline trend for the past 10+ years. Lovely stuff ;)