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Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

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Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#51

Post by alternatex »

skrebbel wrote: post #35

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…

It runs in the browser to allow for more options regarding interoperability. When Outlook is a web app and Teams is a web app you can throw components from one into the other anywhere on the screen. It also saves a lot of money building apps this way. This is the case for all apps built by Microsoft and the trend is not going to change.

In Microsoft, all product managers care about is shipping more features, because that's the only way they can move their career in the company forward. Do yourself a favor and just don't use Outlook for personal stuff. Microsoft has never aimed to make a good impression on the consumer market. They only care for enterprise and that's how they build all of their software.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#53

Post by klreaj »

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.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#54

Post by mysterydip »

alternatex wrote: post #51
skrebbel wrote: post #35

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…

It runs in the browser to allow for more options regarding interoperability. When Outlook is a web app and Teams is a web app you can throw components from one into the other anywhere on the screen. It also saves a lot of money building apps this way. This is the case for all apps built by Microsoft and the trend is not going to change. In Microsoft, all product managers care about is shipping more features, because…

> you can throw components from one into the other anywhere on the screen.

Wasn't this office OLE from the 90s? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#55

Post by Neil44 »

seb1204 wrote: post #39
Neil44 wrote: post #18

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.

Not only does the UI suck, most keyboard shortcuts also no longer work or are just way to slow for my workflow.

That's a hate of mine too I use the keyboard quite a bit in Outlook. No shortcuts in (new).

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#56

Post by dmonitor »

skrebbel wrote: post #35

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…

It running in a browser is especially ridiculous. Has Microsoft just given up on developing native Windows applications now?

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#57

Post by KronisLV »

skrebbel wrote: post #35

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…

> 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.

Even if I personally use Thunderbird, I'm very much inclined to agree! It's a very usable!

That said, I'm kind of partial to the idea of just running something like Roundcube and figuring out a way to have a desktop wrapper around it, e.g. the same way how an app like Mattermost/Slack/Discord can work either in the web or locally. While the resource usage would be like the typical Electron app's, at the same time I like having a consistent UI experience wherever I am more and more, especially with self-hosted software when possible.

Edit: actually wasn't too hard to do this with Electron, however might need to find a webmail that has good support for multiple mailboxes. RainLoop seems to support multiple accounts, but has a dropdown for switching users, not sure how I feel about using the Nextcloud Mail app which has the UI I'd like (a list of accounts to the side, alongside the folders for each), but would couple things to Nextcloud.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#59

Post by ratg13 »

type0 wrote: post #49

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 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

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#60

Post by EnigmaFlare »

Neil44 wrote: post #18

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.

Years ago, they made Outlook the web email service and I thought they were going to deprecate Outlook the application and keep the name for the web email. But man this is confusing. Too many things are called Outlook.
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