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Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

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Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#111

All I want is to be able to give companies my money in exchange for not being spied on, manipulated, or locked into some walled garden. I can't for my OS - I have to use free gnu/Linux because everyone else treats me like crap. Is my money not good enough for them? This is getting absurd

I had to spend several days manually ripping out huge chunks of Win10 to get something resembling the usability of XP. That included removing all of the updating utilities, hosts-file blocking of microsoft servers, removal of most of the preinstalled apps, as well as disabling and deleting all of the scheduled tasks which try to re-install and re-enable those settings. All this trouble so I can play modern PC games..…

1998: I'd never connect a Windows box directly to the Internet. Hackers might break my computer.

2018: I'd never connect a Windows box directly to the Internet. Microsoft might break my computer.

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#112

Dear Microsoft, As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, your horrifically misguided attempts to "improve" Windows since Windows 10 have so degraded the experience of using it that I am now only 2 reasons[0] away from switching anyway, so at least I don't have to pay for the privilege of using crappy software. I would ask you kindly to cease your endeavors to kill off the Windows Desktop and personal computing in gene…

> As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop

well, go on then, elaborate...

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#113

What does HN recommend as a better Win10 email client? I'm familiar with Thunderbird and I'll probably switch to it if nothing else, but I'm not a huge fan of the UI/UX.

This might sound glib, but as someone who has used both Thunderbird and Outlook extensively, I don't recommend any desktop email client. Email clients were designed for a whole different era, and only work well in that context. Gmail, Outlook.com/O365/etc, are designed for you to "keep everything." Problem is that all desktop email clients aren't designed that way, they want you to have a very small limited subset of…

> Problem is that all desktop email clients aren't designed that way, they want you to have a very small limited subset of email that they can index and constantly have in memory.

with large amounts of mail (~90k in one of my inboxes - and if someone asks just yesterday I had to go and fetch some info from a 2007 mail), GMail chokes much more than thunderbird, e.g. it takes 2/3 minutes and sometimes does not work to mark a large set of email as read/archived/whatever while this is almost instant with TB.

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#114

What does HN recommend as a better Win10 email client? I'm familiar with Thunderbird and I'll probably switch to it if nothing else, but I'm not a huge fan of the UI/UX.

Possibly Postbox, it's a commercial app but derived from Thunderbird. I've been using it for years on Mac since Eudora was discontinued, and plan to use it on Windows now that I'm switching back to PC this month:

https://postbox-inc.com/

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#115
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, from the article: > although these ads are interest-based, they do not look at your emails to display ads based on data from your email.

Well, everyone thank Satya Nadella, it's a miracle we were able to draw the line somewhere! /s I'm sorry, this snark is not really directed at you, but how exactly are they determining your interests if they're not reading your e-mails? Where does that data come from? I'd be happy to take back my /s if someone can tell me it was all voluntarily collected, but I suspect the answer is really "they just found a differen…

There are plenty of ways to spy besides email... Bing searches, for instance. I believe anything you type into the start menu is sent to Bing by default, so that could be more data than you think.

I personally use Bing, but not Windows. Looking on my interests page for Bing, I see they have a decent chunk of info on me, nothing too crazy personal though.

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#116

Dear Microsoft, As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, your horrifically misguided attempts to "improve" Windows since Windows 10 have so degraded the experience of using it that I am now only 2 reasons[0] away from switching anyway, so at least I don't have to pay for the privilege of using crappy software. I would ask you kindly to cease your endeavors to kill off the Windows Desktop and personal computing in gene…

> GPU drivers still perform worse for my card Which GPU?

nVidia GTX 1080ti

In addition to the performance degradation, nVidia and the kernel maintainers don't currently get along so I'd also have to deal with that.

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#118

Dear Microsoft, As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, your horrifically misguided attempts to "improve" Windows since Windows 10 have so degraded the experience of using it that I am now only 2 reasons[0] away from switching anyway, so at least I don't have to pay for the privilege of using crappy software. I would ask you kindly to cease your endeavors to kill off the Windows Desktop and personal computing in gene…

> 1. I hate package managers as an application installation paradigm wat so you prefer go to vlc.com for vlc, 7-zip.com for 7-zip, update them by hand or add custom system services constantly running for every program to install themselves, etc etc instead of a `pacman -S 7z vlc krita libreoffice [every other software you need]`

In open source world, this is fine. In the closed source world, this is one step closer towards walled garden. Just the other day, I could not install something because my Windows 10 was set to "install only from store" and I had go in and turn that off. How long before that's no longer even an option?

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#119

Dear Microsoft, As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, your horrifically misguided attempts to "improve" Windows since Windows 10 have so degraded the experience of using it that I am now only 2 reasons[0] away from switching anyway, so at least I don't have to pay for the privilege of using crappy software. I would ask you kindly to cease your endeavors to kill off the Windows Desktop and personal computing in gene…

> As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop well, go on then, elaborate...

Too off topic for this thread, also past experience has shown that all that will happen is a bunch of evangelists will come out of the woodwork to tell me variations of: you're using the wrong distro, you're using the wrong hardware, or your workflow is wrong and you should change how you do things.

Re: Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

#120

What does HN recommend as a better Win10 email client? I'm familiar with Thunderbird and I'll probably switch to it if nothing else, but I'm not a huge fan of the UI/UX.

Possibly Postbox, it's a commercial app but derived from Thunderbird. I've been using it for years on Mac since Eudora was discontinued, and plan to use it on Windows now that I'm switching back to PC this month: https://postbox-inc.com/

Looks good, but is it worth $40? At that point I'll probably just do what others suggested and go back to webmail with browser notifications.
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