6 ms·

Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

71 points by miles 2y ago

CuriousRose 2y ago
Can’t wait for my 75 year old father to call me for tech support when the app auto-migrates, changes layouts, corrupts the mail profile or requires sign in for licence validation. Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).
- nerdile 2y ago
  Agreed. Very disappointed that Thunderbird went the direction they did.
- graypegg 2y ago
  So maybe thunderbird isn't ideal for you because it keeps changing... but I do know for a fact you can disable auto updating in Thunderbird. I would much rather set up a 75 year old with something that will stay the same AND allow installing older versions, than something I don't fully trust will obey the "Disable auto-updates" checkbox.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse). Turn off automatic updates.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    Out of all software to disable auto-updates on, email clients are probably the riskiest, given how much use they get and that they are the number one vector for delivering malware. There's already been a privilege escalation found this year in Thunderbird.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Actually my Thunderbird looks the same for many years now. I set it to a specific layout and it keeps that way. Either distro package maintainers keep this layout change from disrupting me, or I have configured it in a way that even when updates come, I still have my usual oldschool layout with high information density. I too was disappointed to see Thunderbird copy the atrocious Outlook layout. I am sorry, I get 50 e-mails a day, not 3. Outlook is a child's toy and I hope Thunderbird does not turn into one as well.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it. Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space. If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace. If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it. I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is blah. very blah. But it gets the job done, and I hate it a little less than the alternatives. I did get Mutt up and running last week, Oh what joy it was to get it to integrate with Gmail. I will say that if your macOS based MailMate is the best mail client for me. Sadly I am often on the Windows end of things.
- RachelF 2y ago
  Thunderbird does what it says on the box. It just works. It can also now talk to Exchange servers.
- dlivingston 2y ago
  Does MailMate work well with Office 365 accounts? And how does it compare to the stock Mail app? The screenshots I could find look pretty similar. I use Outlook for Mac at home and for Window at work. It's ironic that the Mac version is so much nicer than the Windows version. The Windows version feels like a wrapper around outlook.live.com.
  - 486sx33 2y ago
    It is unless you use old/legacy outlook. The “new” outlook is electron/webapp
- gerdesj 2y ago
  I've been rocking Evolution for around 10 years now. We migrated from GroupWise at my little firm to Exchange a few years before that. I mostly look after the mail systems myself because no one else really seems to give a shit! Provided it carries on working. We have been all in on prem for a good 25 years now and I run a separate Exim n Dovecot with rspamd setup for a few vanity domains. Evo just works. It does have a fair few quirks of its own but nothing as nasty as Outlook. I doubt it will be too popular here - it only runs on Linux.
mingabunga 2y ago
I finally ditched Outlook last month - and settled on eM Client and it's really nice. It does a lot of stuff. Outlook for years had these recurring issues: - mail profile gets corrupted - requiring me to re-setup my mail accounts - from time to time, emails would sit in the Outbox not going anywhere. Then I'd notice hours or a day later. Frustrating. Have to restart Windows to fix it. Maybe the New Outlook is better, but when I first tried it, it was missing lots of stuff.
- davidt84 2y ago
  It still is. Complaining on the Microsoft "support" site for an MVP saying you should just stick to outlook classic and new outlook was only for home users. They didn't respond when I pointed out the official notification that classic outlook was intended to be deprecated (and apparently now is)
layer8 2y ago
I believe that Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with that forced migration, at least in the Windows enterprise world. It’s a bit like if they were replacing Excel with a half-baked version of Google Sheets.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  Your analogy is spot on except there is a MS webby Excel. The goal is to get you totally in the cloud and by you I mean all their customers ... all of them. On prem Exchange is being made as wanky as possible to run and has been for some years. Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom for that other than give them: "death by a thousand cuts". We have an all in one Exchange box so no fancy stuff and it really is painful to watch updates and there is no technical need for it. Its not even a subtle nudge. I've had updates take multiple hours. I'm old enough to remember when email (let alone the www) didn't exist. MS were eventually very clever in the '90s and noughties and have kept on top of things since. They don't have a total monopoly but quite a decent slice of the "market". The goal is silo off users in their cloud. On prem does not make them anything like enough cash. They will lose a few customers to Linux and Apple but the full on subscriptions model will more than fix up the finances.
  - akaktsn 2y ago
    Just wanted to chime in and say it’s nice to see someone from IT on the site. I love the site and can follow a lot of things but feel like it’s mostly developers here.
    - gerdesj 2y ago
      There are a lot of non devs here ... a lot. We just let the kiddies crack on and widdle in public but we are still here!
      - gerdesj 2y ago
        I should point out: Every now and then you will note a comment here that looks a bit more ... insightful than the rest - it might be bollocks or not. Search the username etc. or follow the threads and someone will eventually note who made it. You will find some remarkable people hereabouts. The rest is the usual noise of any other social.
quyleanh 2y ago
The classic Outlook is good now. Enterprise did integrate many addins to it for years. I don’t know replacing with the web based one is better or not. I guess not.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  Outlook was better in the past, too. The "Advanced Find" functionality was better than any other email client I've ever used and it was gutted in 2013 (or 2016-- I don't recall). Outlook (and Office) 2010 we're the peak of the product to me.
  - jonrobertson 2y ago
    Advanced Find still works for me. Outlook classic for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2501 Build 16.0.18429.20132) 64-bit. Shift-Ctrl-F
    - EvanAnderson 2y ago
      The feature is still there but it doesn't return all results like it did in older version of Office. 2016 had a nasty bug that made the Advanced Find window "disappear" (resized itself to a tiny sliver and unless you know the ALT-SPACE shortcut to get to Resize the window is just lost). I don't know if that but persisted into newer versions. Microsoft acknowledged the bug but said they were de-emphasizing Advanced Find in favor of the awful search in the main Outlook window. In Outlook 2010 I could do a search for all messages from a given sender with specific words in the subject and an attachment of at least 100KB and get results.
superkuh 2y ago
Microsoft and the other megacorps hate email. It's a wildly successful federated open protocol. They don't control it. They are all doing everything in their respective powers to turn email into a proprietary experience.
rbanffy 2y ago
Now, if they could just drop Outlook and Teams…
userbinator 2y ago
Absolutely user-hostile move. The same happened to the Outlook Web Access light version --- while it was not pure HTML, it was still much faster and more usable than the horribly bloated "modern" full version. Microsoft is slowly becoming the opposite of what it was known for, and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives. Meanwhile my ISP still offers a webmail client which doesn't require JS at all, and it's been like that for nearly 3 decades, proving that it is absolutely possible.
- WD-42 2y ago
  When was Microsoft known for being anything but a provider of bloated software?
  - userbinator 2y ago
    They were known for relative stability and best in backwards-compatibility, until around the Win8 era.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
      The world runs on legacy software, this is super important. At some point it seems like all industries start with providing useful things people want through creation and competition, and then flip to monopolistic exploitation. How can we keep the first part of this cycle and some how stop it from getting to the second?
- macintux 2y ago
  > and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives. I'm very, very skeptical that anything short of Microsoft's bankruptcy could cause enterprises to seriously reconsider their software. It's just too convenient to pay one vendor for everything Microsoft brings to the table.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    Enterprises will control which version of Outlook they deploy up to the point, in a few years from now, classic Outlook is EOL'ed for EXO. Until that point in time, Microsoft can set whatever default they want, and enterprises will deploy whatever they want to.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Are there any product managers left at Microsoft? So many half baked programs getting deployed before they are finished. Or are there too many project managers that are under constant threat to show impact? Nothing but flashy changes will ever be approved? Notepad now lets you search Bing.
p_ing 2y ago
As noted in the article, you can still get classic Outlook which has a few more years of support. This article is clickbait.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  It's still dropped from new installations, requiring users to actively go seek the classic version, and Microsoft has been nagging classic users to switch to the new Outlook for a while now. While Outlook classic is not dead and buried yet, it's firmly sitting in the casket while Microsoft is pushing down to close the lid.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    Yes, it is absolutely sitting in the casket, and that's probably a good thing, security-wise. Given it is the enterprise that "cares" about classic Outlook due to legacy COM addins, "new users" don't matter so much as they would deploy the correct version required for their userbase. Yes, I'm discounting home users or users with their own small tenant, but there are clear and easy ways to get classic Outlook if that is what you want/need.
MadVikingGod 2y ago
I've used both outlooks, Gmail, and a few other clients, and I think the problem isn't that these are all bad but they are all trying to solve a bad problem. So there never will be a good solution just good enough for someone. There are lots of other problems where we blame the tools and never have a universally loved tool: task planning (Jira), and ERP (Oracle) are some examples. What I would be happy with is if I could use markdown (sans html tags) everywhere. In my emails, in notes, hell I would love if I could use it in word.
greatquux 2y ago
My problem is I support so many applicants which use MAPI calls to create emails to Outlook, and they haven’t and may never add support for MAPI to the web-based version. I kinda thing one reason they are trying to kill the classic Outlook is it’s getting harder to find programmers willing to maintain it.
- greatquux 2y ago
  I found someone's solution that actually does seem to work, even if it's hacky! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1640434/creating-and-sending-an-email-through-new-outlook https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1640434/... and https://gist.github.com/SelimBasyouni/efec48a197bfefb59d4ff75797aae15e https://gist.github.com/SelimBasyouni/efec48a197bfefb59d4ff7... basically create an EML file with X-Unsent: 1 and if you open in New Outlook it will show as a draft. This could basically replace what we're doing with MAPI.
  - jonrobertson 2y ago
    I finished testing that solution earlier and it is what we'll initially implement, until a better solution is available. Note for anyone testing, the C# project created a file with CR/LF line endings, and it does not open as a draft in classic Outlook ("Old Outlook"). Changing the file to end with LF only solved the issue and works with classic and New Outlook.
kenrick95 2y ago
Because of this Outlook (new) non-sense, few months ago I switched to Thunderbird on desktop and mobile, and it has been quite a refreshing experience. Sure the UI need some time to get used to, but it has been my primary driver now
senectus1 2y ago
These are all show stoppers. Offline support – what Microsoft is calling “offline” use of new Outlook isn’t great in practice. I speak from experience on some recent long-haul flights where I was grateful to have classic Outlook as a workable replacement. PST support – at the moment Outlook (new) can only read emails in PST files from classic Outlook. No write access or reading of contact or calendar data. Secure email – Microsoft is now promising S-Mime encryption for later this year. Cross-mailbox – it’s still not possible to move items between mailboxes. Mail merge – only classic Outlook works with Word’s Mail Merge to emails. How they think they can get away with this I have no idea.
LorenDB 2y ago
I'm using Outlook at work but I will 100% jump to Thunderbird if/when the classic Outlook becomes unusable. No way I'm sharing my data with their 700+ partners.
blibble 2y ago
outlook classic is one of the few pieces of microsoft software that isn't abominably bad it's reasonably performant, doesn't crash more than once a day, has a very customisable UI (easily altered for maximum information density), can be scripted and has zero AI slop (cf. teams) so of course they're sunsetting it
nimish 2y ago
Man I'd have just started doubling the cost every year. Wanna keep using some old software we don't really want to support? Better pay up! You'd be surprised how quickly "it's not possible" turns into "oh we'll get right on that"
kjellsbells 2y ago
OC remains superior for power users. For example, if you fly a lot, offline mode barely works on New Outlook, but is rock solid on Classic. In day to day use, the density of emails and other information on the screen is far higher in OC than New, and no amount of tweaking the view density can get New close to OC. Classic also supports really powerful programmability, such as forms and custom views, and although I accept that the golden age of MAPI has long passed, its a shame that nothing in New comes close. However, that speaks to Microsoft and their vision for what they call Modern Work. In this vision, it is Teams that is the center of the universe. Teams is the thing that gets the platform treatment with plug-ins and apps and polish. Outlook is relegated to something the old business people use, and as the generations shift from writing long form messages to thinking anything over a paragraph is tl;dr, I can see Outlook dying off in a few years.
smitty1e 2y ago
In the Glorious Future, is it going to be impossible to use proprietary software without an internet connection? That is, does every piece of hardware we own become (vehicles, appliances, computers, accessories, &c) a spyware vector?
bkaczynski 2y ago
New Outlook still doesn't support RSS/Atom feed...

71 points by miles 2y ago

Can’t wait for my 75 year old father to call me for tech support when the app auto-migrates, changes layouts, corrupts the mail profile or requires sign in for licence validation. Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).

nerdile 2y ago
Agreed. Very disappointed that Thunderbird went the direction they did.
graypegg 2y ago
So maybe thunderbird isn't ideal for you because it keeps changing... but I do know for a fact you can disable auto updating in Thunderbird. I would much rather set up a 75 year old with something that will stay the same AND allow installing older versions, than something I don't fully trust will obey the "Disable auto-updates" checkbox.
userbinator 2y ago
Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse). Turn off automatic updates.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  Out of all software to disable auto-updates on, email clients are probably the riskiest, given how much use they get and that they are the number one vector for delivering malware. There's already been a privilege escalation found this year in Thunderbird.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
Actually my Thunderbird looks the same for many years now. I set it to a specific layout and it keeps that way. Either distro package maintainers keep this layout change from disrupting me, or I have configured it in a way that even when updates come, I still have my usual oldschool layout with high information density. I too was disappointed to see Thunderbird copy the atrocious Outlook layout. I am sorry, I get 50 e-mails a day, not 3. Outlook is a child's toy and I hope Thunderbird does not turn into one as well.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it. Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space. If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace. If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it. I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is blah. very blah. But it gets the job done, and I hate it a little less than the alternatives. I did get Mutt up and running last week, Oh what joy it was to get it to integrate with Gmail. I will say that if your macOS based MailMate is the best mail client for me. Sadly I am often on the Windows end of things.

RachelF 2y ago
Thunderbird does what it says on the box. It just works. It can also now talk to Exchange servers.
dlivingston 2y ago
Does MailMate work well with Office 365 accounts? And how does it compare to the stock Mail app? The screenshots I could find look pretty similar. I use Outlook for Mac at home and for Window at work. It's ironic that the Mac version is so much nicer than the Windows version. The Windows version feels like a wrapper around outlook.live.com.
- 486sx33 2y ago
  It is unless you use old/legacy outlook. The “new” outlook is electron/webapp
gerdesj 2y ago
I've been rocking Evolution for around 10 years now. We migrated from GroupWise at my little firm to Exchange a few years before that. I mostly look after the mail systems myself because no one else really seems to give a shit! Provided it carries on working. We have been all in on prem for a good 25 years now and I run a separate Exim n Dovecot with rspamd setup for a few vanity domains. Evo just works. It does have a fair few quirks of its own but nothing as nasty as Outlook. I doubt it will be too popular here - it only runs on Linux.

mingabunga 2y ago

I finally ditched Outlook last month - and settled on eM Client and it's really nice. It does a lot of stuff. Outlook for years had these recurring issues: - mail profile gets corrupted - requiring me to re-setup my mail accounts - from time to time, emails would sit in the Outbox not going anywhere. Then I'd notice hours or a day later. Frustrating. Have to restart Windows to fix it. Maybe the New Outlook is better, but when I first tried it, it was missing lots of stuff.

davidt84 2y ago
It still is. Complaining on the Microsoft "support" site for an MVP saying you should just stick to outlook classic and new outlook was only for home users. They didn't respond when I pointed out the official notification that classic outlook was intended to be deprecated (and apparently now is)

layer8 2y ago

I believe that Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with that forced migration, at least in the Windows enterprise world. It’s a bit like if they were replacing Excel with a half-baked version of Google Sheets.

gerdesj 2y ago
Your analogy is spot on except there is a MS webby Excel. The goal is to get you totally in the cloud and by you I mean all their customers ... all of them. On prem Exchange is being made as wanky as possible to run and has been for some years. Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom for that other than give them: "death by a thousand cuts". We have an all in one Exchange box so no fancy stuff and it really is painful to watch updates and there is no technical need for it. Its not even a subtle nudge. I've had updates take multiple hours. I'm old enough to remember when email (let alone the www) didn't exist. MS were eventually very clever in the '90s and noughties and have kept on top of things since. They don't have a total monopoly but quite a decent slice of the "market". The goal is silo off users in their cloud. On prem does not make them anything like enough cash. They will lose a few customers to Linux and Apple but the full on subscriptions model will more than fix up the finances.
- akaktsn 2y ago
  Just wanted to chime in and say it’s nice to see someone from IT on the site. I love the site and can follow a lot of things but feel like it’s mostly developers here.
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    There are a lot of non devs here ... a lot. We just let the kiddies crack on and widdle in public but we are still here!
    - gerdesj 2y ago
      I should point out: Every now and then you will note a comment here that looks a bit more ... insightful than the rest - it might be bollocks or not. Search the username etc. or follow the threads and someone will eventually note who made it. You will find some remarkable people hereabouts. The rest is the usual noise of any other social.

quyleanh 2y ago

The classic Outlook is good now. Enterprise did integrate many addins to it for years. I don’t know replacing with the web based one is better or not. I guess not.

EvanAnderson 2y ago
Outlook was better in the past, too. The "Advanced Find" functionality was better than any other email client I've ever used and it was gutted in 2013 (or 2016-- I don't recall). Outlook (and Office) 2010 we're the peak of the product to me.
- jonrobertson 2y ago
  Advanced Find still works for me. Outlook classic for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2501 Build 16.0.18429.20132) 64-bit. Shift-Ctrl-F
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    The feature is still there but it doesn't return all results like it did in older version of Office. 2016 had a nasty bug that made the Advanced Find window "disappear" (resized itself to a tiny sliver and unless you know the ALT-SPACE shortcut to get to Resize the window is just lost). I don't know if that but persisted into newer versions. Microsoft acknowledged the bug but said they were de-emphasizing Advanced Find in favor of the awful search in the main Outlook window. In Outlook 2010 I could do a search for all messages from a given sender with specific words in the subject and an attachment of at least 100KB and get results.

superkuh 2y ago

Microsoft and the other megacorps hate email. It's a wildly successful federated open protocol. They don't control it. They are all doing everything in their respective powers to turn email into a proprietary experience.

rbanffy 2y ago

Now, if they could just drop Outlook and Teams…

userbinator 2y ago

Absolutely user-hostile move. The same happened to the Outlook Web Access light version --- while it was not pure HTML, it was still much faster and more usable than the horribly bloated "modern" full version. Microsoft is slowly becoming the opposite of what it was known for, and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives. Meanwhile my ISP still offers a webmail client which doesn't require JS at all, and it's been like that for nearly 3 decades, proving that it is absolutely possible.

WD-42 2y ago
When was Microsoft known for being anything but a provider of bloated software?
- userbinator 2y ago
  They were known for relative stability and best in backwards-compatibility, until around the Win8 era.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    The world runs on legacy software, this is super important. At some point it seems like all industries start with providing useful things people want through creation and competition, and then flip to monopolistic exploitation. How can we keep the first part of this cycle and some how stop it from getting to the second?
macintux 2y ago
> and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives. I'm very, very skeptical that anything short of Microsoft's bankruptcy could cause enterprises to seriously reconsider their software. It's just too convenient to pay one vendor for everything Microsoft brings to the table.
- p_ing 2y ago
  Enterprises will control which version of Outlook they deploy up to the point, in a few years from now, classic Outlook is EOL'ed for EXO. Until that point in time, Microsoft can set whatever default they want, and enterprises will deploy whatever they want to.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

Are there any product managers left at Microsoft? So many half baked programs getting deployed before they are finished. Or are there too many project managers that are under constant threat to show impact? Nothing but flashy changes will ever be approved? Notepad now lets you search Bing.

p_ing 2y ago

As noted in the article, you can still get classic Outlook which has a few more years of support. This article is clickbait.

makeitdouble 2y ago
It's still dropped from new installations, requiring users to actively go seek the classic version, and Microsoft has been nagging classic users to switch to the new Outlook for a while now. While Outlook classic is not dead and buried yet, it's firmly sitting in the casket while Microsoft is pushing down to close the lid.
- p_ing 2y ago
  Yes, it is absolutely sitting in the casket, and that's probably a good thing, security-wise. Given it is the enterprise that "cares" about classic Outlook due to legacy COM addins, "new users" don't matter so much as they would deploy the correct version required for their userbase. Yes, I'm discounting home users or users with their own small tenant, but there are clear and easy ways to get classic Outlook if that is what you want/need.

MadVikingGod 2y ago

I've used both outlooks, Gmail, and a few other clients, and I think the problem isn't that these are all bad but they are all trying to solve a bad problem. So there never will be a good solution just good enough for someone. There are lots of other problems where we blame the tools and never have a universally loved tool: task planning (Jira), and ERP (Oracle) are some examples. What I would be happy with is if I could use markdown (sans html tags) everywhere. In my emails, in notes, hell I would love if I could use it in word.

greatquux 2y ago

My problem is I support so many applicants which use MAPI calls to create emails to Outlook, and they haven’t and may never add support for MAPI to the web-based version. I kinda thing one reason they are trying to kill the classic Outlook is it’s getting harder to find programmers willing to maintain it.

greatquux 2y ago
I found someone's solution that actually does seem to work, even if it's hacky! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1640434/creating-and-sending-an-email-through-new-outlook https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1640434/... and https://gist.github.com/SelimBasyouni/efec48a197bfefb59d4ff75797aae15e https://gist.github.com/SelimBasyouni/efec48a197bfefb59d4ff7... basically create an EML file with X-Unsent: 1 and if you open in New Outlook it will show as a draft. This could basically replace what we're doing with MAPI.
- jonrobertson 2y ago
  I finished testing that solution earlier and it is what we'll initially implement, until a better solution is available. Note for anyone testing, the C# project created a file with CR/LF line endings, and it does not open as a draft in classic Outlook ("Old Outlook"). Changing the file to end with LF only solved the issue and works with classic and New Outlook.

kenrick95 2y ago

Because of this Outlook (new) non-sense, few months ago I switched to Thunderbird on desktop and mobile, and it has been quite a refreshing experience. Sure the UI need some time to get used to, but it has been my primary driver now

senectus1 2y ago

These are all show stoppers. Offline support – what Microsoft is calling “offline” use of new Outlook isn’t great in practice. I speak from experience on some recent long-haul flights where I was grateful to have classic Outlook as a workable replacement. PST support – at the moment Outlook (new) can only read emails in PST files from classic Outlook. No write access or reading of contact or calendar data. Secure email – Microsoft is now promising S-Mime encryption for later this year. Cross-mailbox – it’s still not possible to move items between mailboxes. Mail merge – only classic Outlook works with Word’s Mail Merge to emails. How they think they can get away with this I have no idea.

LorenDB 2y ago

I'm using Outlook at work but I will 100% jump to Thunderbird if/when the classic Outlook becomes unusable. No way I'm sharing my data with their 700+ partners.

blibble 2y ago

outlook classic is one of the few pieces of microsoft software that isn't abominably bad it's reasonably performant, doesn't crash more than once a day, has a very customisable UI (easily altered for maximum information density), can be scripted and has zero AI slop (cf. teams) so of course they're sunsetting it

nimish 2y ago

Man I'd have just started doubling the cost every year. Wanna keep using some old software we don't really want to support? Better pay up! You'd be surprised how quickly "it's not possible" turns into "oh we'll get right on that"

kjellsbells 2y ago

OC remains superior for power users. For example, if you fly a lot, offline mode barely works on New Outlook, but is rock solid on Classic. In day to day use, the density of emails and other information on the screen is far higher in OC than New, and no amount of tweaking the view density can get New close to OC. Classic also supports really powerful programmability, such as forms and custom views, and although I accept that the golden age of MAPI has long passed, its a shame that nothing in New comes close. However, that speaks to Microsoft and their vision for what they call Modern Work. In this vision, it is Teams that is the center of the universe. Teams is the thing that gets the platform treatment with plug-ins and apps and polish. Outlook is relegated to something the old business people use, and as the generations shift from writing long form messages to thinking anything over a paragraph is tl;dr, I can see Outlook dying off in a few years.

smitty1e 2y ago

In the Glorious Future, is it going to be impossible to use proprietary software without an internet connection? That is, does every piece of hardware we own become (vehicles, appliances, computers, accessories, &c) a spyware vector?

bkaczynski 2y ago

New Outlook still doesn't support RSS/Atom feed...