Absolutely user-hostile move. The same happened to the Outlook Web Access light version --- while it was not pure HTML, it was still much faster and more usable than the horribly bloated "modern" full version. Microsoft is slowly becoming the opposite of what it was known for, and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives.
Meanwhile my ISP still offers a webmail client which doesn't require JS at all, and it's been like that for nearly 3 decades, proving that it is absolutely possible.
> and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives.
I'm very, very skeptical that anything short of Microsoft's bankruptcy could cause enterprises to seriously reconsider their software. It's just too convenient to pay one vendor for everything Microsoft brings to the table.
Enterprises will control which version of Outlook they deploy up to the point, in a few years from now, classic Outlook is EOL'ed for EXO. Until that point in time, Microsoft can set whatever default they want, and enterprises will deploy whatever they want to.
I believe that Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with that forced migration, at least in the Windows enterprise world. It’s a bit like if they were replacing Excel with a half-baked version of Google Sheets.
Your analogy is spot on except there is a MS webby Excel. The goal is to get you totally in the cloud and by you I mean all their customers ... all of them.
On prem Exchange is being made as wanky as possible to run and has been for some years. Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom for that other than give them: "death by a thousand cuts".
We have an all in one Exchange box so no fancy stuff and it really is painful to watch updates and there is no technical need for it. Its not even a subtle nudge. I've had updates take multiple hours.
I'm old enough to remember when email (let alone the www) didn't exist. MS were eventually very clever in the '90s and noughties and have kept on top of things since. They don't have a total monopoly but quite a decent slice of the "market". The goal is silo off users in their cloud. On prem does not make them anything like enough cash.
They will lose a few customers to Linux and Apple but the full on subscriptions model will more than fix up the finances.
Just wanted to chime in and say it’s nice to see someone from IT on the site. I love the site and can follow a lot of things but feel like it’s mostly developers here.
Every now and then you will note a comment here that looks a bit more ... insightful than the rest - it might be bollocks or not. Search the username etc. or follow the threads and someone will eventually note who made it.
You will find some remarkable people hereabouts. The rest is the usual noise of any other social.
>Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom
Technical reason is they don't really want to do them and they are difficult to get right. Office365 does not run Exchange updates, so they don't get properly exercised. The only reason they haven't dropped support for in place updates is customer screaming but trust me, Exchange team would love to.
Proper Office365 way to update Exchange is build new machines, patch them fully, install new Exchange version and move all the mailboxes over.
For Exchange it is. Microsoft officially puts out patches for Exchange and technically patching is supported, it's just Exchange Online does not do it so it's poorly tested and when working with Microsoft 8+ years ago, they told us to rinse and replace. I developed a bunch of Powershell scripts to do it before I stopped being Exchange admin.
Well speaking for myself: the reason why I keep using Microsoft stuff is because I grew up with it. The first computer that I owned came with 98SE.
At this point in my life I do not really want to learn new programmes.
But if MS keeps changing shit I may as well move on to new horizons.
> If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive
What does that mean in more detail? I only have typical corpo Outlook experience, and I find it passable at the best of times. Not even necessarily as the fault of Outlook.
In my experience this means network effects. Microsoft has been very successful in pushing its entire stack at enterprises, and there’s a benefit to knowing that everyone in the org has the same tools and will actually use them. Like, I can send someone docx in an email and can expect that anyone can open and edit it with instruction.
“Most people can get an email and open a document without instruction” may seem like a low bar to you, but in my experience with run of the mill enterprise it’s massively better than the alternatives.
Also, Outlook as a whole is inarguably bloated, but it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails.
I've been rocking Evolution for around 10 years now. We migrated from GroupWise at my little firm to Exchange a few years before that.
I mostly look after the mail systems myself because no one else really seems to give a shit! Provided it carries on working. We have been all in on prem for a good 25 years now and I run a separate Exim n Dovecot with rspamd setup for a few vanity domains.
Evo just works. It does have a fair few quirks of its own but nothing as nasty as Outlook. I doubt it will be too popular here - it only runs on Linux.
I've worked in places with both. I always have my own notes/planner system using text files. Being able to use weblinks to reference emails is a killer feature of even the most ascetic web client. My outlook messages always got lost in the sauce even with folders. (And searching in Outlook was always bad for some reason.)
Does MailMate work well with Office 365 accounts? And how does it compare to the stock Mail app? The screenshots I could find look pretty similar.
I use Outlook for Mac at home and for Window at work. It's ironic that the Mac version is so much nicer than the Windows version. The Windows version feels like a wrapper around outlook.live.com.
Can’t wait for my 75 year old father to call me for tech support when the app auto-migrates, changes layouts, corrupts the mail profile or requires sign in for licence validation. Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).
So maybe thunderbird isn't ideal for you because it keeps changing... but I do know for a fact you can disable auto updating in Thunderbird. I would much rather set up a 75 year old with something that will stay the same AND allow installing older versions, than something I don't fully trust will obey the "Disable auto-updates" checkbox.
Out of all software to disable auto-updates on, email clients are probably the riskiest, given how much use they get and that they are the number one vector for delivering malware.
There's already been a privilege escalation found this year in Thunderbird.
Actually my Thunderbird looks the same for many years now. I set it to a specific layout and it keeps that way. Either distro package maintainers keep this layout change from disrupting me, or I have configured it in a way that even when updates come, I still have my usual oldschool layout with high information density.
I too was disappointed to see Thunderbird copy the atrocious Outlook layout. I am sorry, I get 50 e-mails a day, not 3. Outlook is a child's toy and I hope Thunderbird does not turn into one as well.
Are there any product managers left at Microsoft? So many half baked programs getting deployed before they are finished. Or are there too many project managers that are under constant threat to show impact? Nothing but flashy changes will ever be approved? Notepad now lets you search Bing.
The classic Outlook is good now. Enterprise did integrate many addins to it for years. I don’t know replacing with the web based one is better or not. I guess not.
Outlook was better in the past, too. The "Advanced Find" functionality was better than any other email client I've ever used and it was gutted in 2013 (or 2016-- I don't recall). Outlook (and Office) 2010 we're the peak of the product to me.
I finally ditched Outlook last month - and settled on eM Client and it's really nice. It does a lot of stuff.
Outlook for years had these recurring issues:
- mail profile gets corrupted - requiring me to re-setup my mail accounts
- from time to time, emails would sit in the Outbox not going anywhere. Then I'd notice hours or a day later. Frustrating. Have to restart Windows to fix it.
Maybe the New Outlook is better, but when I first tried it, it was missing lots of stuff.
It still is. Complaining on the Microsoft "support" site for an MVP saying you should just stick to outlook classic and new outlook was only for home users.
They didn't respond when I pointed out the official notification that classic outlook was intended to be deprecated (and apparently now is)
My problem is I support so many applicants which use MAPI calls to create emails to Outlook, and they haven’t and may never add support for MAPI to the web-based version. I kinda thing one reason they are trying to kill the classic Outlook is it’s getting harder to find programmers willing to maintain it.
Because of this Outlook (new) non-sense, few months ago I switched to Thunderbird on desktop and mobile, and it has been quite a refreshing experience. Sure the UI need some time to get used to, but it has been my primary driver now
I'm using Outlook at work but I will 100% jump to Thunderbird if/when the classic Outlook becomes unusable. No way I'm sharing my data with their 700+ partners.
I've used both outlooks, Gmail, and a few other clients, and I think the problem isn't that these are all bad but they are all trying to solve a bad problem. So there never will be a good solution just good enough for someone. There are lots of other problems where we blame the tools and never have a universally loved tool: task planning (Jira), and ERP (Oracle) are some examples.
What I would be happy with is if I could use markdown (sans html tags) everywhere. In my emails, in notes, hell I would love if I could use it in word.
It's still dropped from new installations, requiring users to actively go seek the classic version, and Microsoft has been nagging classic users to switch to the new Outlook for a while now.
While Outlook classic is not dead and buried yet, it's firmly sitting in the casket while Microsoft is pushing down to close the lid.
Yes, it is absolutely sitting in the casket, and that's probably a good thing, security-wise.
Given it is the enterprise that "cares" about classic Outlook due to legacy COM addins, "new users" don't matter so much as they would deploy the correct version required for their userbase.
Yes, I'm discounting home users or users with their own small tenant, but there are clear and easy ways to get classic Outlook if that is what you want/need.
OC remains superior for power users. For example, if you fly a lot, offline mode barely works on New Outlook, but is rock solid on Classic. In day to day use, the density of emails and other information on the screen is far higher in OC than New, and no amount of tweaking the view density can get New close to OC.
Classic also supports really powerful programmability, such as forms and custom views, and although I accept that the golden age of MAPI has long passed, its a shame that nothing in New comes close.
However, that speaks to Microsoft and their vision for what they call Modern Work. In this vision, it is Teams that is the center of the universe. Teams is the thing that gets the platform treatment with plug-ins and apps and polish. Outlook is relegated to something the old business people use, and as the generations shift from writing long form messages to thinking anything over a paragraph is tl;dr, I can see Outlook dying off in a few years.
Microsoft and the other megacorps hate email. It's a wildly successful federated open protocol. They don't control it. They are all doing everything in their respective powers to turn email into a proprietary experience.
Offline support – what Microsoft is calling “offline” use of new Outlook isn’t great in practice. I speak from experience on some recent long-haul flights where I was grateful to have classic Outlook as a workable replacement.
PST support – at the moment Outlook (new) can only read emails in PST files from classic Outlook. No write access or reading of contact or calendar data.
Secure email – Microsoft is now promising S-Mime encryption for later this year.
Cross-mailbox – it’s still not possible to move items between mailboxes.
Mail merge – only classic Outlook works with Word’s Mail Merge to emails.
How they think they can get away with this I have no idea.
outlook classic is one of the few pieces of microsoft software that isn't abominably bad
it's reasonably performant, doesn't crash more than once a day, has a very customisable UI (easily altered for maximum information density), can be scripted and has zero AI slop
Absolutely user-hostile move. The same happened to the Outlook Web Access light version --- while it was not pure HTML, it was still much faster and more usable than the horribly bloated "modern" full version. Microsoft is slowly becoming the opposite of what it was known for, and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives.
Meanwhile my ISP still offers a webmail client which doesn't require JS at all, and it's been like that for nearly 3 decades, proving that it is absolutely possible.
> and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives.
I'm very, very skeptical that anything short of Microsoft's bankruptcy could cause enterprises to seriously reconsider their software. It's just too convenient to pay one vendor for everything Microsoft brings to the table.
Enterprises will control which version of Outlook they deploy up to the point, in a few years from now, classic Outlook is EOL'ed for EXO. Until that point in time, Microsoft can set whatever default they want, and enterprises will deploy whatever they want to.
When was Microsoft known for being anything but a provider of bloated software?
They were known for relative stability and best in backwards-compatibility, until around the Win8 era.
I believe that Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with that forced migration, at least in the Windows enterprise world. It’s a bit like if they were replacing Excel with a half-baked version of Google Sheets.
Your analogy is spot on except there is a MS webby Excel. The goal is to get you totally in the cloud and by you I mean all their customers ... all of them.
On prem Exchange is being made as wanky as possible to run and has been for some years. Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom for that other than give them: "death by a thousand cuts".
We have an all in one Exchange box so no fancy stuff and it really is painful to watch updates and there is no technical need for it. Its not even a subtle nudge. I've had updates take multiple hours.
I'm old enough to remember when email (let alone the www) didn't exist. MS were eventually very clever in the '90s and noughties and have kept on top of things since. They don't have a total monopoly but quite a decent slice of the "market". The goal is silo off users in their cloud. On prem does not make them anything like enough cash.
They will lose a few customers to Linux and Apple but the full on subscriptions model will more than fix up the finances.
Just wanted to chime in and say it’s nice to see someone from IT on the site. I love the site and can follow a lot of things but feel like it’s mostly developers here.
There are a lot of non devs here ... a lot.
We just let the kiddies crack on and widdle in public but we are still here!
I should point out:
Every now and then you will note a comment here that looks a bit more ... insightful than the rest - it might be bollocks or not. Search the username etc. or follow the threads and someone will eventually note who made it.
You will find some remarkable people hereabouts. The rest is the usual noise of any other social.
>Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom
Technical reason is they don't really want to do them and they are difficult to get right. Office365 does not run Exchange updates, so they don't get properly exercised. The only reason they haven't dropped support for in place updates is customer screaming but trust me, Exchange team would love to.
Proper Office365 way to update Exchange is build new machines, patch them fully, install new Exchange version and move all the mailboxes over.
Is that the proper way in EXO? SPO had individual file replacements. SharePoint stamps were not pave-and-build.
For Exchange it is. Microsoft officially puts out patches for Exchange and technically patching is supported, it's just Exchange Online does not do it so it's poorly tested and when working with Microsoft 8+ years ago, they told us to rinse and replace. I developed a bunch of Powershell scripts to do it before I stopped being Exchange admin.
Well speaking for myself: the reason why I keep using Microsoft stuff is because I grew up with it. The first computer that I owned came with 98SE. At this point in my life I do not really want to learn new programmes.
But if MS keeps changing shit I may as well move on to new horizons.
Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it.
Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space.
If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace.
If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it.
I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is blah. very blah.
But it gets the job done, and I hate it a little less than the alternatives.
I did get Mutt up and running last week, Oh what joy it was to get it to integrate with Gmail.
I will say that if your macOS based MailMate is the best mail client for me.
Sadly I am often on the Windows end of things.
> Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive
As a programmer, if I could eliminate email at work altogether, it’d have a net benefit to my productivity.
I would kill for something that merged Teams and email into a single flow of messages and responses in multiple subjects and threads.
I still miss my BlackBerry 10 messaging merging email, SMS, BBM…
You know, Gmail does let you search chat messages too. I thi k it's is:chat. Maybe is:chat OR in:inbox would get you halfway there?
This sounds awful I hate teams and try to never use it
I did like BBM BB on Android “hub” was horrid
Thunderbird does what it says on the box. It just works. It can also now talk to Exchange servers.
> If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive
What does that mean in more detail? I only have typical corpo Outlook experience, and I find it passable at the best of times. Not even necessarily as the fault of Outlook.
In my experience this means network effects. Microsoft has been very successful in pushing its entire stack at enterprises, and there’s a benefit to knowing that everyone in the org has the same tools and will actually use them. Like, I can send someone docx in an email and can expect that anyone can open and edit it with instruction.
“Most people can get an email and open a document without instruction” may seem like a low bar to you, but in my experience with run of the mill enterprise it’s massively better than the alternatives.
Also, Outlook as a whole is inarguably bloated, but it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails.
It means you can get through 300 emails in 1/10 the time as you can in Gmail. Outlook’s layout and software is FAST.
Once it goes web or “new” it’s a laggy piece of crap, still maybe not as bad as g suite though
I've been rocking Evolution for around 10 years now. We migrated from GroupWise at my little firm to Exchange a few years before that.
I mostly look after the mail systems myself because no one else really seems to give a shit! Provided it carries on working. We have been all in on prem for a good 25 years now and I run a separate Exim n Dovecot with rspamd setup for a few vanity domains.
Evo just works. It does have a fair few quirks of its own but nothing as nasty as Outlook. I doubt it will be too popular here - it only runs on Linux.
I've worked in places with both. I always have my own notes/planner system using text files. Being able to use weblinks to reference emails is a killer feature of even the most ascetic web client. My outlook messages always got lost in the sauce even with folders. (And searching in Outlook was always bad for some reason.)
Does MailMate work well with Office 365 accounts? And how does it compare to the stock Mail app? The screenshots I could find look pretty similar.
I use Outlook for Mac at home and for Window at work. It's ironic that the Mac version is so much nicer than the Windows version. The Windows version feels like a wrapper around outlook.live.com.
It is unless you use old/legacy outlook. The “new” outlook is electron/webapp
Can’t wait for my 75 year old father to call me for tech support when the app auto-migrates, changes layouts, corrupts the mail profile or requires sign in for licence validation. Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).
So maybe thunderbird isn't ideal for you because it keeps changing... but I do know for a fact you can disable auto updating in Thunderbird. I would much rather set up a 75 year old with something that will stay the same AND allow installing older versions, than something I don't fully trust will obey the "Disable auto-updates" checkbox.
Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).
Turn off automatic updates.
Out of all software to disable auto-updates on, email clients are probably the riskiest, given how much use they get and that they are the number one vector for delivering malware.
There's already been a privilege escalation found this year in Thunderbird.
Actually my Thunderbird looks the same for many years now. I set it to a specific layout and it keeps that way. Either distro package maintainers keep this layout change from disrupting me, or I have configured it in a way that even when updates come, I still have my usual oldschool layout with high information density.
I too was disappointed to see Thunderbird copy the atrocious Outlook layout. I am sorry, I get 50 e-mails a day, not 3. Outlook is a child's toy and I hope Thunderbird does not turn into one as well.
Agreed. Very disappointed that Thunderbird went the direction they did.
Are there any product managers left at Microsoft? So many half baked programs getting deployed before they are finished. Or are there too many project managers that are under constant threat to show impact? Nothing but flashy changes will ever be approved? Notepad now lets you search Bing.
The classic Outlook is good now. Enterprise did integrate many addins to it for years. I don’t know replacing with the web based one is better or not. I guess not.
Outlook was better in the past, too. The "Advanced Find" functionality was better than any other email client I've ever used and it was gutted in 2013 (or 2016-- I don't recall). Outlook (and Office) 2010 we're the peak of the product to me.
I finally ditched Outlook last month - and settled on eM Client and it's really nice. It does a lot of stuff.
Outlook for years had these recurring issues:
- mail profile gets corrupted - requiring me to re-setup my mail accounts
- from time to time, emails would sit in the Outbox not going anywhere. Then I'd notice hours or a day later. Frustrating. Have to restart Windows to fix it.
Maybe the New Outlook is better, but when I first tried it, it was missing lots of stuff.
It still is. Complaining on the Microsoft "support" site for an MVP saying you should just stick to outlook classic and new outlook was only for home users.
They didn't respond when I pointed out the official notification that classic outlook was intended to be deprecated (and apparently now is)
My problem is I support so many applicants which use MAPI calls to create emails to Outlook, and they haven’t and may never add support for MAPI to the web-based version. I kinda thing one reason they are trying to kill the classic Outlook is it’s getting harder to find programmers willing to maintain it.
Because of this Outlook (new) non-sense, few months ago I switched to Thunderbird on desktop and mobile, and it has been quite a refreshing experience. Sure the UI need some time to get used to, but it has been my primary driver now
I'm using Outlook at work but I will 100% jump to Thunderbird if/when the classic Outlook becomes unusable. No way I'm sharing my data with their 700+ partners.
New Outlook still doesn't support RSS/Atom feed...
I've used both outlooks, Gmail, and a few other clients, and I think the problem isn't that these are all bad but they are all trying to solve a bad problem. So there never will be a good solution just good enough for someone. There are lots of other problems where we blame the tools and never have a universally loved tool: task planning (Jira), and ERP (Oracle) are some examples.
What I would be happy with is if I could use markdown (sans html tags) everywhere. In my emails, in notes, hell I would love if I could use it in word.
Man I'd have just started doubling the cost every year. Wanna keep using some old software we don't really want to support? Better pay up!
You'd be surprised how quickly "it's not possible" turns into "oh we'll get right on that"
As noted in the article, you can still get classic Outlook which has a few more years of support. This article is clickbait.
It's still dropped from new installations, requiring users to actively go seek the classic version, and Microsoft has been nagging classic users to switch to the new Outlook for a while now.
While Outlook classic is not dead and buried yet, it's firmly sitting in the casket while Microsoft is pushing down to close the lid.
Yes, it is absolutely sitting in the casket, and that's probably a good thing, security-wise.
Given it is the enterprise that "cares" about classic Outlook due to legacy COM addins, "new users" don't matter so much as they would deploy the correct version required for their userbase.
Yes, I'm discounting home users or users with their own small tenant, but there are clear and easy ways to get classic Outlook if that is what you want/need.
OC remains superior for power users. For example, if you fly a lot, offline mode barely works on New Outlook, but is rock solid on Classic. In day to day use, the density of emails and other information on the screen is far higher in OC than New, and no amount of tweaking the view density can get New close to OC.
Classic also supports really powerful programmability, such as forms and custom views, and although I accept that the golden age of MAPI has long passed, its a shame that nothing in New comes close.
However, that speaks to Microsoft and their vision for what they call Modern Work. In this vision, it is Teams that is the center of the universe. Teams is the thing that gets the platform treatment with plug-ins and apps and polish. Outlook is relegated to something the old business people use, and as the generations shift from writing long form messages to thinking anything over a paragraph is tl;dr, I can see Outlook dying off in a few years.
Microsoft and the other megacorps hate email. It's a wildly successful federated open protocol. They don't control it. They are all doing everything in their respective powers to turn email into a proprietary experience.
These are all show stoppers.
Offline support – what Microsoft is calling “offline” use of new Outlook isn’t great in practice. I speak from experience on some recent long-haul flights where I was grateful to have classic Outlook as a workable replacement.
PST support – at the moment Outlook (new) can only read emails in PST files from classic Outlook. No write access or reading of contact or calendar data.
Secure email – Microsoft is now promising S-Mime encryption for later this year.
Cross-mailbox – it’s still not possible to move items between mailboxes.
Mail merge – only classic Outlook works with Word’s Mail Merge to emails.
How they think they can get away with this I have no idea.
In the Glorious Future, is it going to be impossible to use proprietary software without an internet connection?
That is, does every piece of hardware we own become (vehicles, appliances, computers, accessories, &c) a spyware vector?
outlook classic is one of the few pieces of microsoft software that isn't abominably bad
it's reasonably performant, doesn't crash more than once a day, has a very customisable UI (easily altered for maximum information density), can be scripted and has zero AI slop
(cf. teams)
so of course they're sunsetting it
Now, if they could just drop Outlook and Teams…