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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."
Maybe this will cause peopel to realize that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express AREN'T the only way to use the internet. With any luck, mozilla and its ilk should be seeing a lot more customers once the EOL for Internet Explorer 6 and Outlook Express 6 hits and Microsoft either A) Requires a new version of windows for new features or B) Requires MSN subscription, both of which are alternatives that home and small business users (and probably large business users too) won't want. So let's make sure we have a very user-friendly product with plenty of advertising, eh?
My Systems
Oh, ok... so what you're saying is we no longer have outlook express... it's now part of the OS and we can't de-couple them... it's an integral part of the OS... honest your honor!
Seriously... They're doing with outlook express, what they did with Internet Explorer... except this time, they are bundling outlook functionality with their Web business, instead of their OS... Same shit different pile...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
There goes the best Hotmail client there ever was. Treat hotmail just like e-mail without paying for premium POP3 service. Oh well.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Don't start up your flamebait moderation yet. I think this is sad news. OE has been my favorite email client for a long time. It starts quick, has message rules etc, and is easy to use. Yes there are other clients, but I will miss it.
Outlook is to large and too slow to start. I have a key on my keyboard for email, and I like to hit the key and have the results within seconds as opposed to tens of seconds.
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
Take away their free email program and they'll be FORCED to buy our commercial products! Ha!
Quick Smithers, find the Mozilla development team and kill them all!
This seems a logical step given several factors:
I was an OE user for rather a long while and it had always seemed a bit nicer interface than Outlook proper. In maybe three years, I never had a data failure and it was quite reliable. Obviously the security angle was, er, non-existent (anti-secure perhaps) but it felt fast and mostly did what I told it.
But I'm an Evolution user now, so OE won't be missed. Better for all of us, if you ask me.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Consider: What does Outlook Express allow one to do? Well, for no more than the cost of Windows, the user gets an email client that allows them to fetch data from a POP server and store it on their hard drives.
Now think about Microsoft's "next-gen tech" initiatives. Let's see, there's three, really:
1) Blackcomb, which promises an explosion of metadata (read: data bloat) and phenomenal background cycle usage (read: mandatory hardware upgrades) for not much user benefit. (Have you looked at how much metadata is stored in the "Properties" pages of a Word XP document? Good grief, there's tons. Now how often do you use that? Roughly... never? Bingo.) Not really any connection here.
2) Trusted Computing/Palladium. Again, not much connection here. (Interesting that when MS says it's interested in protecting copyrighted works, it means media distributors' copyrighted works... not the copyrights that you own regarding the email that you write, which is open for pilferage by Outlook worm du jour.)
3) Hailstorm. DINGDINGDING! We have a winner.
An' it goes a little somethin' like dis:
Microsoft has realized that it can't easily sell many more upgrades of Windows or Office. The "more stable Windows" line has been exhausted from re-use. The Office paperclip is already in 3D and can't be improved more. So, to continue reaping monopoly profits, they want to move sofware to the rental model. They drop the initial price on their software, but bill you monthly for the rest of your life, and for the same software.
Now - how can it do that? If they give you the software, they can't prevent you from using some dirty h@x0r trick to crack it and then stop paying. So, they retain much program functionality on MS's servers. You no longer own a functional copy of Word. You just own an input/output web interface to their copy of Word.
But while they're on this track - while they're pushing you to surrender your software to MS - why not convince you to surrender your documents to MS as well? They'll store the data on their servers. It will always be accessible (so long as you pay your licensing fees like a good little serf), and you don't have to worry about hard drive crashes or data loss (disclaimer: no guarantees, understand; you waived your rights through shrink-wrap.) So now you can't switch to some dirty pirate-OS like Linux without forfeiting all of your data.
Of course, Hailstorm died a PR-debacle death, because users aren't quite that stupid (or more accurately, tech-savvy users anticipated their treachery.) But Microsoft's dreams of rental pricing didn't die. After all, they have no other real improvements to offer for their core products.
Hence, no more Outlook Express.
Where's the tie? Easy. OE allowed you to store your mail on your server. But of course, Hotmail and MSN store your data on their servers. It's prepping you for the day when all of your data is on their servers.
Welcome to the future. Prepare to be assimilated.
David Stein, Esq.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Microsoft will find new ways to make IT staffers suffer. Suffer ? Its job creation dude. Rock on
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
They stop developing "conventional" email client because they don't need it. .net/passport clusters for consumers.
OE is simple and standards-based (pop, imap) client, works like a charm with Unix mailservers. Why MS would need it?
Instead, they do their standard embrace-and-extend trick -
customer is fed up with insecurity of traditional email and spam?
Fine, we are going to have new mail client built right-into the OS, working some proprietary protocol against Exchange backend (for corp users) or against monstrous SQL Server /
No need to download another client just like with the browser. And guess what - in a little while SMTP/POP3/IMAP will become a niche, because everyone will have MS supermail on their desktops.
They are trying to do to email what IIS was going to do to the web - quetly and gradually replace open protocols.
Apache stopped IIS from monopolizing the web. What is going to stop this one?
It really is true that if html is not allowed as a 'mail medium' the spammers will not be allowed to show their presentations and/or direct you to dangerous sites. It is really that simple and if Outlook is out of the picture, spam has the great setback that has been a long time coming. This is a serious note BTW.
You're wrong.
Outlook is just one mail client. So long as HTML mail can be sent, it will be sent, and it will be used for spam--and for other things as well. It doesn't matter if every installation of Outlook suddenly vanishes tomorrow--there will still be HTML/MHTML mail, and there will still be spam.
Of course, to remove HTML mail would require a level of effort such that a proper check on spam would be easier to implement.
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.)
Maybe this will cause peopel to realize that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express AREN'T the only way to use the internet. With any luck, mozilla and its ilk should be seeing a lot more customers once the EOL for Internet Explorer 6 and Outlook Express 6 hits
.NET, and so forth. I normally kept OE6 set to display messages as plain text, disabling HTML. I've heard plenty of whining about Outlook Express security, but the majority of "security" issues were caused by idiots opening executable attachments.
My primary browswer is Mozilla. My second choice is Opera. Internet Explorer is a distant third. I've got bootable Linux, *BSD, and BeOS OS systems. I'm no Microsoft shill.
For e-mail clients, I had been using Outlook Express and just switched to Outlook in the last week. I have fairly demanding e-mail needs with several domains, multiple e-mail addresses, list subscriptions, and so forth. I tried quite a few shareware and public domain e-mail clients and found all of them lacking in one critical way or another. The list included the Mozilla e-mail client, Eudora, PocoMail, The Bat, and Pegasus Mail. Most had usability issues.
At least two of the clients pretended to have imported all of my messages in all of the folders (probably about 70,000 messages for the last 7 years sent and received) only to have failed to import a substantial portion of them. No error messages were displayed during the import process. Sorry, but that's a no-go. I'm unwilling to give up my message archive for professional and legal reasons. Nor am I willing to trust a program that would silently fail in that manner.
In those years, I have never contracted a virus, trojan horse, or worm through Outlook Express. I kept it patched and up-to-date. I had it set to use the "Restricted Sites" security setting which disabled such things as scripting, Java, ActiveX,
All of that said, I'm not blind to the faults of Outlook or Outlook Express. It was idiotic for Microsoft to include scripting of any kind for incoming messages. What were they thinking? Making an e-mail client that would retrieve from web sites without the user's permission was responsible for many people telling spammers "hey, my address is live!" The inability in OE to pick up from multiple mailboxes and have each go to its own folder is a glaring fault. There are, of course, other flaws and foibles.
All in all, though, Outlook Express was a damned good e-mail client for me. It had a well-designed user interface, was reliable, and served my purposes, and those of millions of other users, very well. Maybe this will spur on the development of other clients to the point that they rival or exceed Outlook Express, but right now, OE6 is still one of the best Windows e-mail clients available.
Of course, to remove HTML mail would require a level of effort such that a proper check on spam would be easier to implement.
Most Outlook Express clients that are configured to send HTML are configured to send both text/plain and text/html, with reasonably valid tags. Most Outlook Express users also spell at least half Just flag as "junk" any message 1. that has text/html but no inline text/plain, 2. whose inline text/html content does not substantially match its text/plain content, 3. whose text/html content has a large number of comments or unknown elements, or 4. that, after deleting words not valid in any language the intended recipient speaks, consist primarily of a link whose content is an image to be retrieved via HTTP. These quick checks seem to work well as a front line of defense against junk e-mail, and SpamAssassin uses variants on them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wait a second, webmail does not require SMTP/port 25 to send mail. Your client isn't sending mail. Its basically sending a form to the server, via a CGI process (perl or php typically) and the SERVER uses port 25 to actually send it. You only need port 80 for insecure and 443 for secure webmail.
I block port 25 on my home windows and linux boxes simply because if I DO get infected, at least my box won't send out to anyone else on 25, regardless of what program is trying to do it, including the virus itself. I have not used stunnel to ssl my mail yet, but that is in the works. But I know I am not using 25 on SquirrelMail, and I am sure with any webmail server.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
-- Wizards for the lame, and straight forward for us techs?
Don't you think it would be better if they wrote straight forward apps for everyone so you didn't need wizards in the first place?
The need for "wizards" is a sign of usability problems.
I wish that a few large, influential companies would stand up to Microsoft and call them on their lame business strategy: closed, proprietary standards that keep everyone else out of the game. Microsoft simply does not compete on innovation. Why doesn't this get more press? Why does the main stream media not criticize Microsoft more often? They appear to be going out of their way to keep data formats and protocols both closed and unnaturally complex just to keep other systems out of the game. I think that alone says that they recognize that their software is not superior!
I work at a large Fortune 100 company and we use Lotus Notes as our groupware. I hate Lotus Notes: it has the worst user interface I've ever encountered, is fairly buggy, and just generally kind of sucks. Everyone at work wishes we'd switch to Outlook! In my mind, that's the only advantage Lotus Notes has: it's not Outlook! That's all Microsoft wants: a few large influential companies to use Outlook so they can play the vendor lock-in card, start changing standards, and have another Office-like monopoly on their hands... but with email.
The Internet Explorer monopoly is scary enough. Now Microsoft is working on email. Microsoft is working very hard at destroying the openness of the Internet; they want to own the Internet.
They think webmail is going to be more popular than imap, or pop3 mail boxes.
If Microsoft lets its market share for desktop-based e-mail clients slip, it could be short-sighted.
I use web-based mail at work (iPlanet/SIMS) and web-based mail (Yahoo) at home as my primary mail-reader. I have broadband in both locations and the responsiveness of web-based e-mail conpared to desktop e-mail clients is negligible.
My work-at-home CEO has satellite at home. He can't use the web-based product because the interactive sluggishness from delay and packet loss would kill his productivity. SSH-tunneled POP works great for him because his local e-mail client (Outlook) downloads new e-mail in the background and sends messages out in the background while he is composing/reading mail quickly in the foreground.
When I administered e-mail for a dialup ISP, the primary method our users preferred to access their e-mail was POP to Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger. It is painfully slow to browse through e-mail over a dialup connection. There are still millions of dialup users out there. They are the majority of users on the Internet.
If people use wireless devices in the future, their experience will be more similar to dialup/satellite than broadband, and they'll demand a product that isn't web-based-only. Some of the ideas brought to light by Central or similar technologies could satisfy both broadband/fixed and narrowband/mobile users.
Microsoft makes an excellent user interface for e-mail. They're good at that. Their enterprise/corporate customers may continue to pay for it. Other products like M2, Evolution, and Mozilla will help fill the consumer niche if they open it up. If it weren't for Microsoft's early monopoly bundling tactics vs Netscape Navigator (founded on a "beta/intro is free, production version costs money" business model), we might not have nor expect free browser and e-mail software. We're spoiled. If it weren't for security or playform supportissues, more of us Slashdotters might use Outlook Express.
-ez
PS: I lied. My primary mail reader is MH.
The real downside to webmail for me is (are you ready for this?) it's on the web. I keep a backlog of essentially every email I recieve. I have things burnt onto CD from over 4 years ago, which is when I first had a non-webmail, non-AOL account. Unless webmail places start giving insanely larger starage spaces (say, 50 megs instead of 5) and/or offer a very easy download solution, they are worthless for general use. Add to that the fact that you have to be online (okay, I have cable, so that's not a real issue) with a good connection to read, and even with a good connection it would take longer to move things between folders, read past messages, search, etc. and webmail starts to look very unappealing. The only benefit for power users at least is that you would have all your messages whereever you go.
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
Stocks in all major Antivirus vendors were down on the news.
CEO's of major Antivirus vendors were unanimous in advising their shareholders that "there's nothing to worry about - there are plenty of other Microsoft products out there..."
OK, I'll bite... I would love to know who this "design rule" is attributed to, because having "two modes of operation" like what you're suggesting is demonstrably not a good thing. (I'd cite sources but it's late, and hey, you didn't.)
It's not at all impossible to have an application that's accessible to both beginners and expert users. It's just that the beginners need a bit more hand-holding: dialog boxes, explicit menu items, etc... while experts, in a well-designed app, should be able to accomplish stuff faster and more efficiently via direct manipulation, shortcut keys, and operations that are a bit more hidden to new users. But you don't *hide* advanced options, and you definitely don't have two modes... keep the advanced options there, and make as much stuff reversible as possible so users will feel more comfortable poking around and trying things to get the hang of it. In most apps today, much more is technically undo-able than apps generally allow.
And keep in mind that beginners and expert users are both in the minority for the kind of complicated, probably often-used application like an e-mail client. The majority of users will be some level of intermediate, since beginners don't stay beginners forever, but most don't ever become experts. It's your basic bell-curve thing. But if you think about it like that it doesn't make sense to design only for one extreme or the other, or as you're suggesting, both.
Anyway, I'm just spouting Alan Cooper here... go get About Face 2.0 and read it. You will learn much. He's usually right on the money, even if he does have a tendency to point out all the stuff Microsoft does right (and yes, they do many things right UI-wise, which makes sense when you remember that they spend way more money on usability testing than anyone else.)
Anyway, bedtime for me.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...