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Microsoft Stops Development Of Outlook Express
Jman314 writes "According to a ZDNet story, Microsoft will cease development of their Outlook Express email client. "The technology doesn't go away, but no new work is being done. It is consumer email in an early iteration, and our investment in the consumer space is now focused around Hotmail and MSN. That's where we're putting the emphasis in terms of new investment and new development work." says Dan Leach, lead product manager for Microsoft's information worker product management group. Microsoft's alternatives include, not surprisingly, the full version of Outlook."
The full version of Outlook is still supported
Outlook Express is no longer supported
Well, guess who isn't stopping their development?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
Version 0.1 is still better than Outlook Express ever was. Anyone with any experience with the Mozilla products, especially Firebird, knows that each incremental version increase brings loads more functionality, features and options.
So while I would shed a tear over Outlook Express going away, truth is, a rat's ass I do not give.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
All the functionality + security features and no "click and run" worm support
SMTP and Webmail are two different matters entirely.
SMTP has to do with how the mail is transfered between servers.
Webmail/POP3/IMAP have to do with how the end user reads mail in their inbox
Also webmail is quite capable on non-windows servers
SquirellMail (Open source imap webmail) is a much better interface than hotmail ever was
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
There are several webmail to POP gateways that work just as well. For example, YahooPOPS.
Litigious bastards
I've been using webmail exclusively for a year now, so I agree. We use SquirrelMail. It's a great webmail program with tons of plugins (calendars, weather, spellcheck, translators, virtual domains, etc...) Most of our customers use it for access to their e-mail--though it doesn't stop them from using POP3 or IMAP clients if they prefer. Definately worth a look if you're interesting in providing webmail services. Oh yeah, GPL of course.
One word of warning--many of the plug-ins don't seem to work well with the 1.4 series yet. You may want to stick with the 1.2 series for a while if you need a lot of the plug-ins. Otherwise, 1.4 works great and is a bit faster.
Sadly, Outlook Express was far more standards-compliant than full Outlook. And that's not saying much.
Here are just some of the things that annoy the hell out of me about Outlook:
Everyone in my office uses Outlook except for myself and a few others. I've wanted to set up a newsserver to replace our current policy of cc'ing random people when trying to have a discussion. Sadly, the only Microsoft solution would have been to use Outlook Express to connect to the news server. (No, installing Mozilla/Thunderbird on everyones machines and training people to use it is not an option, sadly.)
Outlook Express can pick up from multiple mailboxes and dump them into seperate folders. I do it all the time. It's under their Mail Rules.
..
Tools -> Message Rules -> Mail -> New -> "Where The Message is from the specified account" -> "Move it to the specified folder"
Done... Now when my Work email gets checked with my six other accounts, Work goes into a Work folder.
I've never spent much time with the Windows version, but the old MacOS version was superb, and I know a bunch of very savvy tech folks -- people that were generally of the Linux & Free software persuasion -- that swore by OE/Mac as their favorite mail client.
However, it has been obvious for a while that that software probably didn't have a future. Outlook Express was never updated to be a native OSX application, so you had to run it in Classic mode. That was enough to start turning away users, but I understand that even still it's fairly popular.
But I digress.
If you read between the lines here, it's not just OE that's being dropped. Consider this quote from the article:
In other words, Microsoft saw OE as their IMAP client, and so by dropping OE, they are also abandoning the IMAP mail protocol. In spite of what Mr Conn says, IMAP is a very rich protocol: it allows you to maintain multiple mail folders on the server, it allows you to keep your mail client configuration on the server, and in principle it allows you to store arbitrary files on the server.
All of this allows the user to have great mobility: leave the office and you can have all the same data available at home, or at school, or while travelling. All of this, in other words, is open competition for Exchange.
This isn't just abandoning OE, this is vendor lock-in. Microsoft is trying to steer us towards a world where you have two choices for mail access: get a Passport & sign up for MSN Hotmail, or buy a copy of Office and use Outlook to connect to your corporate or ISP provided Exchange server.
There is no room for open protocols in this worldview, and so no room for alternative servers (Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail, Exim) or clients (Mozilla, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Pine, Mutt, Eudora, etc).
The death of an open protocol is the real headline here, but both the journalist & the story submitter seem to have missed it.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Just to make it clear, I did notice Microsoft's casual dismissal of IMAP, but I didn't mention it for journalistic reasons. I reported the facts; this discussion inteprets them. I do agree, however, that stopping OE development is stupid and replacing it with Hotmail is really stupid, but I left that for the reader.
So you see, there can be journalistic neutrality on Slashdot!
That's bunk, man.
No, it's not "bunk." It's a factual representation of my experiences.
Use a real MUA, like mutt.
Mutt is text-based, can't easily import the messages that I already have, and does not work under Windows -- which is the primary OS that I use personally and professionally. Therefore, it does not meet my needs.
It's also no more "real" than any of the more sophisticated e-mail clients that I mentioned.
I do believe Netscape included the innovative html-format in their email client first. Html emails are not all bad, but usually a simple url to the formated text is just as good, especially if you don't know the recipient.
> webmail does not require SMTP/port 25 to send mail
First, that's not what he said. He said "the server must recieve your message somehow," and that that was done with SMTP.
Second, you are totally wrong. You need SMTP to send or receive mail.
Here's an incoming message, if you had a Hotmail account.
1. I send you an e-mail, from a "real" e-mail account.
2. My SMTP server finds the MX record for @hotmail.com
3. My SMTP server makes an SMTP connection to said server; sends message.
4. Hotmail server serves up your e-mail in a big ad-laden MSIE-tailored webpage, IIRC not via SSL. Only the login itself was SSL a few years ago, the last I used a Hotmail account. Though I agree, a few "webmail" providers do offer this.
So in an incoming e-mail, it was exposed in plaintext once, or more likely, twice.
You reply to me:
1. You load another huge webpage.
2. You type a message and click "Send."
3. Hotmail looks up the MX record for @starseven.net
4. Hotmail uses SMTP to send the message to the given server.
5. I read the message via IMAP.
So, in an outgoing message, e-mail, it was exposed in plaintext twice.
The only way you wouldn't use SMTP is if oneguy@hotmail.com e-mails anotherguy@hotmail.com, since Hotmail will then proudly tell you it used the "HotmailDirect(tm)" System to "instantly deliver" your message. But that is by no means all the time.
For everyone's sake, people need to learn how e-mail works, before the stinking mass that is "webmail" engulfs us all.
My guess is something like this:
Scary.
I beta tested for the new office coming out (2003 they call it) and once again outlook is lacking support for newsgroups. Better luck next time.