Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud

The 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.

The 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.

Every 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.

Outlook (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.

Meanwhile, Thunderbird is rolling out MS Exchange capability by v130 (which I am hoping must be very soon)

They'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.

Its 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.

The 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.

The 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.

It'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.

The 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.

They move it to the cloud where it becomes AI food.

This is over a year old news.

Same "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.

I 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)

So even if your company has its own mailserver everyone is locked out of email if some Microsoft services are down, again. Brilliant.

Break them up. We need revised antitrust laws.

WinoMail is a good replacement for the Mail app, in case anyone is using it and is being shoved to using the Outlook App

My 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.

I 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.

If you still use Outlook for ANYTHING then it's self-inflicted and well deserved.

New Outlook is 100% shit. So many features missing. Even adding attachments is sick. Of course, given it's an embedded web app.

Can't train your AI if your customers' emails are stored locally.

Ah, 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 ;)

one step closer to finally merge hotmail and outlook together

For 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.

The 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.

Well, it has more Copilot AI stuff baked in, that's what people want nowadays.

Folks, don't complain. You wanted the cloud, you're getting the cloud.

are we just waiting for excel to exhibit this behavior shortly?

Article 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?

its 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.

So 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

Can it yet do proper quoting?

Yet 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.

Welcome to the Extinguish phase...

So like IMAP?

I 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.