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."

Comments

It seems many of the posters missed the last line

[The Uninformed]

The full version of Outlook is still supported

Outlook Express is no longer supported

Awww, that's too bad.

[Chromodromic]

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.

Thunderbird

[mao che minh]

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

All the functionality + security features and no "click and run" worm support

Re:Standard Protocols?

[PepsiProgrammer]

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

Re:No more hotmail support...

[Nucleon500]

There are several webmail to POP gateways that work just as well. For example, YahooPOPS.

Sadly, Outlook Express was better than Outlook...

[Phs2501]

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:

• Cannot use newsgroups without going through an Exchange server. Exchange servers really frell things up, as I'll explain below:
• Exchange servers modify the Message-IDs of news messages they get via NNTP! This completely breaks threading for standards-complient stuff. This doesn't affect Outlook, though, because:
• Outlook uses a completely different (and weaker!) threading system! One that's not compatible with standard References: or In-Reply-To: headers.
• For more fun, Outlook uses the same stupid incompatible threading system when going through Exchange for email! Want to view your lame friend's messages threaded in mutt? If they use Outlook, too bad. Particularly bad on mailing lists.
• Ironically, if Outlook connects directly to a real SMTP server to send mail and not via the Exchange backdoor, you get real In-Reply-To headers! *boggle*

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.)

Not just a client, but a protocol is being dropped

[babbage]

As some commenters have noted, while OE certainly can be blamed for a lot of security gaffes, in usability terms it really has been excellent software.

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:

"IMAP is just not a very rich protocol," Steve Conn, Exchange Server product manager, told ZDNet Australia during the company's Tech Ed conference. "The great majority of people used Outlook Express because they weren't on a LAN environment, and Outlook was just too fat for them."

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.