Microsoft force-upgrades Mail app to Windows 11’s new Outlook web app
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https://www.windowslatest.com/2024/03/19/microsoft-force-upgrades-mail-app-to-windows-11s-new-outlook-web-app/
https://www.windowslatest.com/2024/03/19/microsoft-force-upgrades-mail-app-to-windows-11s-new-outlook-web-app/
This'll be great at the business level: do you use Outlook, or Outlook?
Kind of like Teams: do you use Teams, Teams (New) or Teams (Home)?
Microsoft: failing at branding since 1992.
To be fair, classic Teams is being killed in 10 days.
To be even fairer, there was no need for New Teams apart from Microsoft's increasing desire to make everything a fucking web app.
Funny, I migrated back to the old faithful, Thunderbird.
Go fuck yourself Microsoft.
EDIT: To be fair to Microsoft, they did warn people this was gonna happen like a year ago. Still stupid.
The mail app ws perfect, it was so perfect.
Thunderbird or thebnew outlook app dont compare.
The Mail app looked great, but I would hardly call it perfect. It constantly failed to notify me of new emails or calendar events, and I know I'm not alone in that.
Desktop mail clients all seem to be dire, but Mail for Windows 10 seemed to suck a lot less than anything else. I, too, am a victim of it not noticing new mail for a couple of hours after it's sent unless I explicitly refresh it, despite it being set to get new mail on push, but I'd still rather use it over Thunderbird, which I tried years ago, and tried again when they started warning about forcing Outlook onto people. Unfortunately, it looks like Mozilla decided that there were a non-zero number of good things about Outlook, and made a clone of it, as it's got basically all the things I hate about Outlook.
I use thunderbird at home and outlook at work and prefer thunderbird. It works nicely with my catch-all mailserver so it automatically uses the correct outgoing address.
Searching for mails is also a breeze compared to outlook.
That may be the fault of your mail server. If Mail has a connection to it, but it never gets a push for new mail, it won’t notify you.
The mail server for the accounts I've noticed it struggling with is GMail, and it manages to push mail to other clients on my non-Windows devices just fine.
It was pretty good, but it was hell to troubleshoot.
I've had to set up IMAP on that app a whole bunch of times and if it decides it doesn't like your server, it'll grey out all the settings and show an infinite progress bar that does literally nothing, for up to minutes at a time. Settings that worked yesterday may suddenly be broken. The manual refresh button is more of a suggestion than anything else.
I don't expect Microsoft's new "give us your password and we'll download your email to our cloud, you can trust us" solution to work any better, though. These "apps" make me miss Windows Live Mail and its predecessor, Outlook Express.
As someone who works IT supporting senior citizens, this forced switch is really bad. The mail and calendar app was simple and great for them, and this change sucks. Thunderbird has not been a viable option with those I've tried so far - too different and too complicated for them.
Funny. My grandpa has been using Thunderbird and Libre Office for years, and he never realised it until recently (and he uses it a lot). He recently had an issue for the first time and asked me as he was trying to fix it with Microsoft but didn't get anywhere, and I had to break the news to him it wasn't their product.
I'm not the one who set it up for him btw. But whoever did so made it look as much as to make it easier for him to switch. Which worked as he had no clue and thought he got some free version or so.
I do also use it, but my setup isn't Microsoft-like per se. I'm rather happy with it tho.
Don’t know about perfect, but it was simple and wasn’t bloated like Outlook or Thunderbird. For someone who just needed to send and receive emails, nothing else, it was nice.
There are two outlooks on my Windows machine now. Outlook and (new) Outlook.
Get your shit together, ms
I've recently got my hands on a laptop with 3 different versions of Teams. And broken updates...
Reminds me on how they forcefully started slowly upgrading everyone to the new Teams app, that doesn't support half of what the previous one did. For example, the company I work at actually used the "Wiki" on Teams to create very long and detailed (many hours of work) important documentation for projects. It was not my choice, but it was how the company decided to work. Well the new Teams app killed the Wiki. We lost access to a lot of documentation and the managers took a long ass time to understand our problem and only did when their own Teams also updated. We had to revert back to the old teams and constantly click ignore on the upgrade notification, while at times mistakenly clicking accept and having to revert back again, until we copied everything out of Wiki and to another platform entirely. We lost a lot of (paid) hours to just copy and reformat the whole wiki from many projects into a new platform. All this were paid hours, and money that didn't need to be wasted if it wasn't for Microsoft complete retardness. This together with other retard moves on other office apps is slowly convincing my company to completely get out of the Office 365 for Enterprise, including Azure and other stuff just because Microsoft is really getting on our nerves lately.
I don't understand how can Microsoft do so much shit and still be so widely used and so many companies absolutely depend on Microsoft. If Microsoft sneezes, half of the IT world shakes. But those who suffer just keep paying anyway. Are we all clowns?
I'm a sysadmin and these days a good third of my job is apologizing to end users for the stupid shit Microsoft does that I have no control over. Managing Microsoft products is like having a bunch of ticking time bombs that you have to juggle while everyone yells at you.
Sometimes I feel like the managers of my company and many others companies like these are just a bunch of clowns, that keep getting fcked my MS but keep paying them Enterprise licenses that are sometimes thousands of $$ per month. If a service costs thousands per month, it shouldn't be stressful to use and give so much headaches... I just think some CEOs don't know that a company can function (sometimes better) without Microsoft products. From Office to Windows to Azure, many companies nowadays think they can only function if they pay Microsoft. And MS knows and likes this.
The last few years have been really bizarre. In 2019 it really felt like my org was moving away from Microsoft. I'd just retired Skype and we were moving over to this new Microsoft Teams thing but the executive team was asking me about moving to Google Apps and dropping Outlook/Exchange/Sharepoint entirely, maybe we expand our Slack usage too? Then Covid happened and Teams turned into essential infrastructure overnight.
Fast forward a few years and the entire Microsoft experience is now basically built around a Teams-first strategy. It's the main thing that my users care about and use on a daily basis. They want more things integrating with it and use it as a pathway into other Office products. Microsoft is making a real mess of things, but it's kind of crazy how fast they pivoted to meet the new needs of their users and keep them locked in.
TPM on my motherboard is forever disabled and I’m going down with the Windows 10 ship. Another couple years and Proton will be even better than it already is.
KDE neon does, but for games it takes some work on your side to enable. I'm dual booting that alongside win 11.
Considering it's bleeding edge, it's probably pretty frustrating to do atm, I'd wait a little bit longer for proper HDR support down the software stack
Thanks, that's good progress from the last update that I saw. Makes me hopeful that I can make the switch soon.
TPM on my motherboard is forever disabled
Assuming that's a choice and not a hardward limitation, why?
TPM on my motherboard is forever disabled
If that's just to stop W11 that's stupid. TPM chips are security related. Disabling them has some serious drawbacks.
Now there are discussion on if you'd even want a TPM chip or not, and if you choose not to use it for such reasons it may be a well thought out decision. Then you won't hear me complain. But to trow out security components just to prevent an update, without looking at the possible consequences, is stupid. There are better ways to prevent that anyways.
Uhh, wtf?
The new app isn't finished, there's no way to refresh mailboxes and RSS feeds other than restarting it.
How on earth did they decide this was good enough?
I had a nice one today. I saved an email for archiving for all to see ( you know, as a .msg) and tried to open it. Windows asked if I would like to open it with Outlook (new). Sure, I thought, only to be greeted by the message "sorry, this function is not supported".
Why do you do this to me Microsoft?! Why?!
New Outlook is a web app in disguise and unlikely to full support local files like that. It doesn't even support .PST.
Microsoft doesn't want you managing email on the computer anymore, they want you to only be thinking about it as an aspect of the cloud.
Microsoft is fully on the Agile development bandwagon. Users are officially code testers, whether they want to be or not.
It's the Silicon Valley equivalent of Hollywood's "we'll fix it in post."
At work on Monday I opened the full Outlook app and then the shitty new Outlook Web App also force opens. And the new app really is shit - for example I'd set up a whole bunch of folders with contacts in and shared them with other users; in the Web App those folders are entirely empty. Forcing people to migrate to a worse version of their platform. Fuck microsoft.
I have 365 Outlook installed on my home PC for the rare times I work from home, but I barely use Windows anymore and if needed I'll just remove Outlook rather than put up with this nonsense.
Forcing people to migrate to a worse version of their platform.
A worse version they're paying for.
Thankfully Microsoft said they're supporting classic Outlook through 2029. Otherwise pushing New Outlook as it exists now, without reducing the license price accordingly, would be almost straight up robbery.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that in the years to come they're going to start removing access to classic Outlook from more of the 365 licensing options. You already can't use it on F3 and some others, eventually they'll pull it from everything expect the higher tiers as a way of forcing companies to move.
And you can bet your ass they'll warn them sternly about 3rd party mail clients. Those "security risks" will keep them from seeking any alternatives, even if they're completely safe.
I really hope that this might finally push more development of open source desktop email clients.
Thunderbird is just... messy. Too many "I like to tinker more than I like my software to work" options, and a good bunch of features I would expect standard in an email client as old as it that simply aren't there. I don't want to have to pick between 6 competing addons for the same basic functionality.
Too many "I like to tinker more than I like my software to work" options
I fail to see how this is a problem. What are you suggesting here? Eliminate all those options so it looks nicer?
Legitimately, what makes New Outlook so fucking awful is that they did exactly this. They cut out half of the actual usability, options, and functionality of Outlook to make a "clean, lightweight experience". And it's objectively terrible as a replacement.
This sentiment that software needs to get dumber because people can't stand having to look at a bunch of options can seriously die in a fire.
Having the tinkerer options should come after making the software work. From my perspective, Thunderbird is a passable clone of a bad mail client. None of its tweakable options turn it into a good mail client, and so it would be a better mail client than it is had the effort spent on implementing the tweakable options instead been invested into making it generally better.
Sucks. This is why I refuse to update anything for as long as possible, to avoid all this type of shit.
The problem I have is not with the Outlook app, but with how much data the Outlook app collects from your emails. I cna assume the outlook.com email (my junk email lol) is thoroughly rifled through, but I don't want my other emails to contribute to that.
Back to Thunderbird, I guess.
And while we're at it, please default newest at the top, Thunderbird!
@Blaster_M @ardi60 I'm a long time #Thunderbird user - and it always defaults newest at the top if that's what you want. Just click the Date header to sort that way (click it again to reverse). And yes, it will remember it next time you launch it.
Can't say if the new install defaults are that way (it's been years) but it's trivial to change.
Every time I read about how M$ behaves and how users just put up with it, I have to laugh.