81–90 of 136 posts
Folks, don't complain. You wanted the cloud, you're getting the cloud.
I never wanted any cloud. I never used a MS account to sign into windows either, which is becoming ever more of a fight.
Folks, don't complain. You wanted the cloud, you're getting the cloud.
People didn't want the cloud. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others wanted everyone in the cloud to get them on the subscription bandwagon. I hope more and more people vote with their wallets and go to other platforms and tools.
For non-techies, it is not immediate obvious what the downsides even are, or why they should matter.
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.
The chatbot interface where you can ask basic questions is still missing in the old Outlook though. But you can use the web interface at https://copilot.microsoft.com to access your emails too.
Other than that I agree, the new outlook is terrible, and it's ridiculous that it doesn't support offline email. It's really nothing more but a wrapper for the web interface.
I'm not a huge fan of copilot either. It's not nearly as capable as they try to make it look. Unfortunately all the top dogs in our company are riding the AI hype train so they must all have it.
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 mo…
Yeah I know, our Microsoft consultants are constantly spamming this "Use Teams not mail" BS. And the "Why are you not using edge yet?" stuff. I really hate the Microsoft approach where every technical person must also push all the marketing drivel.
However Teams has a major problem: Discoverability. In Outlook when you communicate a lot you can move your emails to custom folders to find them back easily. In Teams you can't. Every ad-hoc chat opens up some Sharepoint site somewhere and after using Teams for a couple years it means you have thousands of locations where your information could be. It's a huge mess and there is no way to manually categorise this to find back important stuff like you could with email.
This whole "cloud" lingo serves to hide technological realities and privacy implications with the only goal to improve business.
Meanwhile, Thunderbird is rolling out MS Exchange capability by v130 (which I am hoping must be very soon)
I just this week lost access to my hotmail/outlook account from Thunderbird, although I'm on a much older version. Sounds like MS dropped POP3 support, probably for my own 'safety and security'. How long has that been an industry standard though, shame. Anyway a good trigger to drop another ad focused company, at least that is what it seems when I was forced to use the web interface today.
Yes, your safety and security from Microsoft.
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…
This move seems to be in line with the Microsoft I know. They have always done it - ruin good things. There have been many MS products over the years and they have all turned to shit. As soon as Microsoft did something good, they always come out with a new version that is terrible. It's the most Microsoft thing ever, in my opinion.
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…
During this week, I had a client approached me to build him a Spam Reporter Outlook add-in. He wanted the add-in to be cross-platform (Windows, macOS and Web). I started working on the project by creating a new project in Visual Studio 2022 and choosing Outlook Web Add-in as a template. Once the new project was created and ready, I pressed F5 to run the boilerplate, "Outlook.com" was launched in the browser (Edge) and it took forever to load! The loading spinner keeps turning.. then I realized, there was an error in the code and the execution was held until I choose 'Step Forward'. I was really puzzled why a fresh project could crash in the first attempt, then I quickly noticed the error was not in the project's code but in another .js file that was loading in Outook.com tab, checked the js URL just to find the domain it belongs to is unusual (at least for me),it reads something like "https://www.taboola.com/loader.js". To add insult to injury, this file was reloaded every time I clicked on a different email, it drove me crazy when I realized this "loader.js" was actually an ad injector, there was plenty of spammy ads on the right side of each email opened. Somehow, I was able to block this whole garbage by simply accessing the "Network" tab, find this .js devil then blocked it. Only then, I could continue to work on this project peacefully!