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Microsoft Wants To Force Windows 10 Mail Users To Use Edge For Email Links (theverge.com)
Microsoft has revealed today that "we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge." What this means is that if you have Chrome or Firefox set as your default browser in Windows 10, Microsoft will simply ignore that and force you into Edge when you click a link within the Mail app. The Verge reports: "As always, we look forward to feedback from our WIP community," says Microsoft's Dona Sarkar in a blog post today. I'm sure Microsoft will receive a lot of feedback over this unnecessary change, and we can only hope the company doesn't ignore it.
Use a different mail app ... problem solved.
(1) View webmail in a different browser
(2) Install Outlook, which will remain configurable for business reasons
(3) Install Thunderbird or another 3rd party email app
Microsoft Mail is the new Outlook Express, without the charm of a built-in NNTP client...
I use a desktop email app, because I can respond to stuff when I'm offline and get notifications on my laptop. Thunderbird is still awesome. Plus I host my own IMAP server and don't feel like giving all my personal info to Google/M$/Yahoo/Apple.
>""As always, we look forward to feedback from our WIP community," says Microsoft's Dona Sarkar "
Be careful what you ask for....
Flip the middle finger at your users, AGAIN, for the zillionth time, and expect what? A "thanks, this is great!"?
Seriously, the only thing I am going to trust Win10 with (somewhat) when win7 goes out of service will be gaming. No email, no web-browsing, nada. They can f*** their creepy selves. Instead I will have a clean, trustworthy Linux box for anything non-gaming and a win10 box for gaming only.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Or just keep running Win 7 -- just don't be stupid and click on links from spy32545434warecle4ner.ru. Some computers are perfectly fine running XP in 2018 as long as they're not used by numpties.
But spy32545434warecle4ner.ru is where I get all my porn!
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Or any dekstop mail app?
Why would I install a pointless bloated program (or worse, an "app") on every computer I use? Just ssh and do mail from the server. :p
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
are you a pine, elm, or mutt sort of dude?
"You have new mail."
Wow, really? Let me check spy32545434warecle4ner.ru real qui{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
#DeleteFacebook
Yes. Those of us who actually have to communicate with more than abbreviations and pansy little icons.
Or just keep running Win 7 -- just don't be stupid and click on links from spy32545434warecle4ner.ru.
Even when Win 7 goes out of support, it's only support for client programs that really matters. As long as the TCP/IP stack has no holes that can't be firewalled against, there's no reason for Windows updates.
Some computers are perfectly fine running XP in 2018
Alas, Firefox stops support for XP and Vista in June 2018, leaving you with no usable browser. That makes the computer no good for a typical user, although it'd still be useful for that Windows-only $1M medical device.
And, it looks like Windows is rapidly stopping to be the problem. IOT crap, on the other hand...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Run an old Firefox -- if sites b!tch about it being insecure, change the UserAgent string as appropriate.
You mean with a real keyboard and no ads? Yes, I use a desktop mail application. What else would I use?
It was a couple decades ago, but I'm 99% sure this is the exact thing they lost an antitrust lawsuit over already (only instead of Edge+Mail it was IE+Explorer.)
" we can only hope the company doesn't ignore it."
Wrong. What you can do is take control of your hardware with an OS that permits it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's linked to your windows login, so if you have a hotmail account from the 90’s (which you probably do if you had email in the 90’s) logging in with hotmail and having it sync everything is incredibly convenient. Plus with Google linking your email with YouTube account and social media I don't like giving out my gmail anymore, don't want people to look up everything I ever uploaded or every comment I've made when I send them an email.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Excellent trolling, sir!
Maybe to your Windows login, not to mine. I use a local account -- I have no desire to "stink" my devices with Microsoft's "clown" any more than I need to.
NO I don't want it! First Edge is broken and does not work correctly. If Microsoft will fix Edge so it doesn't take 40 clicks to save something in a specific folder and stop Edge from using Bing or always trying to guess what I want, in other words let me turn that off, no I mean really turn it off not give me a button to turn it off but still does crap in the background, I mean really be able to turn it off. Then I would give Edge a chance.
Or any dekstop mail app?
Why would I install a pointless bloated program (or worse, an "app") on every computer I use? Just ssh and do mail from the server. :p
Because that pointless bloated program is built into windows 10, but you could argue windows is a pointless bloated program too ;)
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Seriously, the only thing I am going to trust Win10 with (somewhat) when win7 goes out of service will be gaming.
I was recently forced to move to windows 10 because windows virtual reality headsets only work with windows 10. It's not better than windows 7, feels like more of the same really.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
... all 3 people.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I just use Thunderbird and POP. Lightning is built into Thunderbird now. Phone and pads use Imap just to read until I get back to the PC to pull mail.
I like my reality -- I'd rather stay with Win 7 than use a nausea-inducing VR headset with 10.
I had email in the '90s, both from the university and my home ISP. I certainly heard about Hotmail back then, but saw no reason for it.
I've never had a "Windows login" (is that something they added in 10, or is it older? I jumped from XP to Linux), and I've certainly never had a Google account.
People have no idea how much easier it is to use an Android device without a Google account on it.
Why would anyone use something that's linked to so many other things?
be free....use linux....
Stupid or greedy, taking payola from M$ to obsolete old systems so they can get everyone into their walled garden?
They already did this with Cortana. Remember her? No, probably because anyone who was using her stopped when it started ignoring your default browser and always opens Edge instead.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Even for games....
I understand that for AAA games Windows is the way to go.
But if you are into the indie game scene, most indie games on Steam also work on Linux.
I also have Windows for gaming only, but currently all the games that I am palying work on Linux.
Thanks Steam.
Yes. I use a desktop mail client precisely because I like to maintain my own archive. My .PST file is about 22 GB in size at the moment, consuming about 80 cents' worth of disk space at current prices. It doesn't go back to 1999, but it goes back about 12 years.
People are always trying to sell me on everything from IMAP to GMail, telling me how great the experience of using server-side email is compared to Outlook. It's funny, though... whenever somebody needs to know what X said in an email from Y months or years ago, they always come to me.
are you a pine, elm, or mutt sort of dude?
Me, elm. And trn as my News Reader. I wouldn't call them 'apps'..
I'm not familiar with the Windows environment at all, but couldn't one just install let's say Firefox, replace the Edge executable with a batch script of the same name that transposes the Edge args into Firefox args, and then from said script call the Firefox executable with those args?
They have loads of legacy code in their codebase to support XP. Something drastic changed in their hardware-accelerated UI rendering that requires Windows 7 or higher to run. I wish I could remember the details. Someone could fork it and backport security fixes, but wouldn't be able to easily backport new functionality.
... except for gaming. I jumped to the big fruity ship that Apple built. It was that bad on Windows. Now it’s that good on Mac: Office apps with a *nix shell.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
*bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark*
*BLAM* *BLAM*
NO TERRIER
Does USENET still exist other than a sink for weird spam?
I'm not a fan of Windows but at least hear them out. Here is what was said in the blog post.
"For Windows Insiders in the Skip Ahead ring, we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge, which provides the best, most secure and consistent experience on Windows 10 and across your devices. With built-in features for reading, note-taking, Cortana integration, and easy access to services such as SharePoint and OneDrive, Microsoft Edge enables you to be more productive, organized and creative without sacrificing your battery life or security. As always, we look forward to feedback from our WIP community."
I can understand the change. They are just making their mail app as consistent and seamless as possible. Opening a browser within a mail app, or any app for that matter, is pretty clunky IMO. I always thought when you click a link in Twitter on Android it is annoying. I don't think most people would mind the change and would probably prefer this behavior. If you want to use a different browser, copy the link and past it into the browser you likely already have open. Come to think of it, that's already what I do. When I have to use Windows at work, I never actually click on links within Outlook. I copy the link and paste it into the browsers I use (which is pretty much everything but Edge). I don't even change the default Browser.
.. nor your preferences.
Fuck them. Use software that does.
I don't use Windows 10 mail, Live Mail, or anything with the words "mail" and "windows" or "microsoft" in the same title. Previously it was because I happen to like the mailer I've been using (in various versions) since the nineties, but now I have an even better reason -- currently, when I click on a link, it opens in Firefox. Or Chrome, whatever one has one's default browser set to.
I understand Microsoft wanting people to use all Microsoft products whenever possible, but I have to wonder -- is this a sign that Edge isn't reaching estimated levels of popularity?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you're actually using the Windows Store Mail app, Edge is what you deserve for a browser.
on microsoft computers.
Just play computer games on Windows computers.
Let MS collect data about the fun of playing computer games.
That fast CPU, GPU, their OS and all the computer games.
Move your work to a real OS that respects your privacy.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
There will be one left though. Always one last person clinging to the belief that Microsoft can do no wrong.
You mean: "no legitimate technical reason that I, not being a browser developer, can think of off the top of my head".
Keeping everything running on Windows XP is actually an enormous pain. All kinds of important improvements like faster rendering and more secure sandboxing rely on features that aren't present in XP. To preserve XP compatibility you have to add "if (windowsXP)" code paths (which in some cases means entirely different implementations of large chunks of functionality) and keep testing them, which means bloated and more fragile code as well as lots of extra work.
I'm not certain about their gaming, they've been doing stupid stuff there too if you buy games from their app store. Don't forget the stupidity of Windows for Games Live, whenever they see some other companies monetizing users MS will always jump in and try to grab a piece of the pie too.
You mean a Windows branded VR headset, or all VR headsets in the entire world that can work with Windows?
Note that some AAA games that you could optionally get from the apps store worked worse than the same game purchased a different way. They only sell "Universal Application Platform" apps in their store, and most games aren't built that way and are more traditional apps. There aren't enough AAA games in the Windows app store to know how this is going to play out though, but if history is any indication, Microsoft will screw this up the same way they screwed the pooch with GFWL.
Sure, there's comp.misc which has refugees from the beta. For the parts of usenet I use, there's hardly even any spam now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Our company has never fully supported the Win 8 or 10 Mail apps. If it works, fine, but if a user calling in has trouble with it, apart from checking the basic settings, our policy is to assist them in installing Thunderbird as a replacement or to point them towards webmail instead.
Worst. Client. Ever.
This is yet another step in the wrong direction.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I want a CPU upgrade for gaming eventually, so that is unfortunately not an option. Otherwise I would probably be doing that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I am into both. Hence I basically need that Windows box at least for a part of what I am playing. Otherwise I would go with no Windows at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. I will avoid the MS app store if at all possible. So far there is nothing available only there that would tempt me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I will stay away from the MS app store if at all possible. So far MS never had anything I wanted badly enough. And yes. MS screwing up things is not the exception, it is the expectation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I use Sylpheed on my desktops and laptops, but I use mutt from my phone (through termux).
I think it works rather well.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I am just not sure if Microsoft or Windows 10 users are going to be the ones cut! Tim S.
Don't care about firefox - I recently found that streaming audio through VLC sounds a whole lot better than through firefox (probably because VLC has an equaliser), so that one little eeePC running XP will continure to provide audio for my kitchen. I've turned off all other network services, and it sits behind the household firewall, so I'm not worried.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Avoiding dodgy domains doesn't help much...
There is a lot of malicious advertising present on otherwise legitimate sites, legitimate sites also get hacked and configured to spread malware.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
There will likely be third party builds which still run, there are still third party builds for powerpc macs among other things.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The websites?
I didn't even know android would let you do that.
I find it convenient. If i need to reset my device, I can easily find what i had installed before
Really? I've never cleaned up any of my email in hotmail. They just periodically increase the size of online storage, and I've never had any reason to.
Outlook at work has a 50gb storage limit on the server. When they upped it to that I moved my pst emails back to the server. Makes it easier to reimage the machine and not worry about it
My over 15 years worth of email is on a self hosted IMAP server using MailDir format. That means it's very stable, is theoretically readable with a text editor and gets an automatic backup every night.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Which makes since, since games are the only thing that really push the full capabilities of a modern machine to the max.
Thunderbird is still awesome.
Note for long, sadly. Hopefully they provide some sort of API for service additions (e.g. dealing with Exchange's bullshit), but I'm not holding my breath.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/thunderbird-will-phase-out-legacy-add-ons-will-support-webextensions/
Thanks for the heads-up on this AC. Time to change my Apt settings so Thunderbird never gets updated again. Now I have to hope that Moonchild takes on a 'Pale Bird' project to save Thunderbird from the crackpots at Mozilla, the way he saved all that was good from Firefox with Pale Moon.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It's linked to your windows login, so if you have a hotmail account from the 90’s (which you probably do if you had email in the 90’s) logging in with hotmail and having it sync everything is incredibly convenient. Plus with Google linking your email with YouTube account and social media I don't like giving out my gmail anymore, don't want people to look up everything I ever uploaded or every comment I've made when I send them an email.
I totally get your mistrust of gmail - the only account I have there is pseudonymous, and I only have it because I need access to the Play Store, and that's the only use it ever gets. But let me get this straight: you trust Microsoft - the folks who forced their rented-spyware-masquerading-as-an-OS onto the computers of gazillions of people - more than you trust Google? Why?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Yes. I use a desktop mail client precisely because I like to maintain my own archive ... ... whenever somebody needs to know what X said in an email from Y months or years ago ...
^^This, a thousand times. I still use POP, so I can maintain an archive of inbound mail on any and all machines I have. And I'm slow to clear the server, so it's easy to bring even new machines up-to-date without copying over the database manually. Now, if I could just find a way to make POP synchronize the sent mail on all of my machines. I've been told that IMAP can do that, but I've never been able to figure out how to make IMAP (a) leave both sent and received messages on the server while (b) storing both sent and received messages locally and (c) automatically syncing both sent and received messages on any device I choose.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
We don’t care because there hasn’t been any major improvement in email apps in 20 years. For most of us we actually will just use the web app or what ever we have on our system.
Besides for this topic. Why should we need to click a link in the emails? Just so we can install spyware faster.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why would anyone click a link in an email?
That is the fast track to spyware.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
*bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark* *bark*
*BLAM* *BLAM*
NO TERRIER
Aww...wish I had mod points today.
But not THAT great. I used it exclusively for 6 months just to get a solid feel for it. Edge is definitely a worthy contender. With some patience on the part of MS, it will organically gain greater market share. So far, it deserves it (OSS politics aside). But it shoving down peoples throats? I thought MS was growing out of that flawed marketing ideology. This will not create more Edge users. It will create more Thunderbird users and other alternative email application. As for my own installation of Windows 10. I use Thunderbird and Firefox anyhow.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
You're running Thunderbird (a free software program; a program that respects it's user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify the software) on top of non-free Microsoft Windows (proprietary, user-subjugating software). Microsoft has all the power they need to get your IMAP credentials. If you have Google, Apple, or other proprietary software running on the same system they likely can read your stored credentials or read your keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screen grab whatever they want too. So you've likely already given those credentials away without realizing it.
Windows users have already been through many instances of Microsoft asserting its control over the user: tricking users into switching from Windows 7 to Windows 10, ignoring the so-called privacy settings thus rendering them irrelevant even if set to ostensibly maximize a user's privacy, and so much more. There's simply no sound argument for believing that running any program on Windows or changing any Windows settings in any way will result in making Windows respect a user's choices when they conflict with what Microsoft wants. As with all proprietary software, ultimately the proprietor controls how the software behaves and therefore users only get as much control as the proprietor allows.
If you want to be in more full control over your computing (as one might surmise from the unusual choice to run your own IMAP server), you really should consider switching to a fully-free software OS such as a GNU/Linux system where you install only free software on top of that.
Digital Citizen
Use Xfce rather than Gnome and the desktop on Linux is still good. Debian lets you mostly kill off the brokenness of systemd and Slack, Devuan and a few others remove it entirely.
Just say no to Wayland until they face the fact that they deliberately ignored a commonly used feature of X and then lied about X by claiming it never had it.
The one I'm using now is only a few years old and it has over half a billion of them. Did you mean valves?
P.S. My what?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And yet, like I said, I'm the only one of my peers who ever seems to actually be able to retrieve stuff when it's needed. It's probably a good thing I don't work at the White House.
There always seems to be a reason why IMAP users can't put their hands on the message they're looking for. Usually it's somebody else's fault, which I guess is the whole idea.
Yes. I use a desktop mail client precisely because I like to maintain my own archive. My .PST file is about 22 GB in size at the moment, consuming about 80 cents' worth of disk space at current prices. It doesn't go back to 1999, but it goes back about 12 years.
People are always trying to sell me on everything from IMAP to GMail, telling me how great the experience of using server-side email is compared to Outlook. It's funny, though... whenever somebody needs to know what X said in an email from Y months or years ago, they always come to me.
Dude you need to take care of that .PST file ASAP. After awhile when it gets too big Outlook will corrupt it by writting the latest data wrapped to the begining of the file. You will loose anything.
I have been threatened so many times by furious executives screaming GET ME MY ARCHIVE back to my bosses etc. Outlook 2007 only supports 23 gig and I forgot the limit of the later version.
If you switch to office 365 you can drag the folders to the cloud. I would do so.
http://saveie6.com/
That was indeed a massive, massive problem with older versions of Outlook. But 2010 has been rock-solid for years, and has remained surprisingly fast as well.
Nevertheless, my .PST file is backed up on a journaling file system very frequently. If Outlook shits the bed at 50 gigabytes or whatever, I'll roll it back and split off an archive. No biggie.
Outlook versions prior to 2010 were terrible, all right. 2010 is great. When/if the .PST file becomes corrupt, it should be easy enough to deal with.
I was a senior desktop support analyst. There is no fix. Your data is gone. Another poster said the same thing. I think it maybe close to 50 gigs but Outlook will get flaky very soon.
I HATED PST files as they are were the bane of my existence for any migration from old to new PC. Fail one and you're fired and are very inefficient. One of the great things with the cloud are no more PST files which are good as that data belongs on a server. Not on a PC. ... done nitpicking.
http://saveie6.com/
You mean a Windows branded VR headset, or all VR headsets in the entire world that can work with Windows?
The problem is you need some beefy hardware. Windows 7 is no longer supported for anything after Skylake hardware. Even Skylake had no Windows 7 support until Dell and HP SCREAMED to support it until 2019 before EOL.
New business laptops do not use the latest 2 intel cpu and chipsets for this reason :-D
Also Nvidia no longer supports Windows 7 32 bit which is the majority of enterprise installs.
http://saveie6.com/
if we just don't use Windows mail? Can we please get rid of Edge, It is as bad as Bing!