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Is Microsoft Trying To Make Windows 10 Mail Worse? (venturebeat.com)
Emil Protalinski via VentureBeat argues that "Windows Mail is unusable, and instead of improving it, Microsoft is looking to drive users away": Microsoft started forcing Mail to use Edge for email links in Windows 10 build 17623 last month. This week, the company started including Office 365 ads right at the bottom of the app. But even these poor decisions are just extra nails in the coffin. Windows Mail has difficulty sending and receiving email. No, I'm not exaggerating for effect. If you have an email open and Windows Mail detects that a new email has hit your inbox, you'll get a notification. Standard stuff. If, however, you then click on said notification, Windows Mail will take you to the open email message, rather than the one that you just clicked on. That's half of the time. The other half of the time this happens, Windows Mail will crash altogether. Apparently having one email open and trying to open another one that just came in is overwhelming for Windows Mail. But that's not the end of it.
Windows Mail is also notorious for not sending emails. Multiple times a week, I open an email, hit reply, type out a quick message, hit send, and alt-tab back to Chrome or Word. Any normal email client will send the message despite the app not being the active window. With Windows Mail, countless times I have wondered why I never got heard back to a specific reply, only to discover hours later, and completely by accident, that the message is still a draft. It's not even sitting in my outbox -- it's just a fucking draft. I end up debating whether to send the email hours late, or if it doesn't make sense to send it anymore. That's not a decision I should have to make. There are of course small features I would like to see added to Windows Mail, like being able to set formatted signatures (as opposed to just plain text), but that's hardly a priority. Windows Mail is unusable, which means Windows 10 doesn't come with an email client. That's incredibly sad.
Windows Mail is also notorious for not sending emails. Multiple times a week, I open an email, hit reply, type out a quick message, hit send, and alt-tab back to Chrome or Word. Any normal email client will send the message despite the app not being the active window. With Windows Mail, countless times I have wondered why I never got heard back to a specific reply, only to discover hours later, and completely by accident, that the message is still a draft. It's not even sitting in my outbox -- it's just a fucking draft. I end up debating whether to send the email hours late, or if it doesn't make sense to send it anymore. That's not a decision I should have to make. There are of course small features I would like to see added to Windows Mail, like being able to set formatted signatures (as opposed to just plain text), but that's hardly a priority. Windows Mail is unusable, which means Windows 10 doesn't come with an email client. That's incredibly sad.
Their UWP platform is FAIL all round, its just HTA/ActiveX just in a different wrapper, there are zero UWP apps that are a "must have" and developers know this, no users, developers or managers want or asked for a "store" (and associated antitrust privacy/SPOF Windows Live account) in Windows and now WinPhone is dead it doesnt make sense, junk the whole thing, fix the bugs and leave the fucking thing alone.
For me I'm using Thunderbird. It's good enough. And it's not like mail is going to change radically as it is now.
You may think that Thunderbird is a bit old, but it's working pretty well and don't cause any trouble.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
...I've been happily using 'mutt' for the past two decades without any of the problems you described.
I never ran into the artificial 2 GB PST crash/eat-all-your-email limits. There are no limits in maildir.
I didn't have to wait for days while incompetent Exchange admins ran eseutil in a futile attempt to recover a massive binary blob mailstore. ZFS ensures data integrity, provides online backups, and the ability to roll back to snapshots instantly.
I never ran into a company-wide multi-day email outage because of "Me too!" replies (https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-too/). Most open source mail servers are pretty damn robust and don't charge $2,000+ per server you spin up.
I never had to wait for my IT team to buy licenses to allow me to connect to my mail server. Only in Microsoft-land do they charge you to buy a mail server (Exchange), while also charging you to buy the client (Outlook) that was specifically designed to talk to that mail server....and then they have the balls to say you need special permission to 'allow' them to talk (CALs).
I get better compression on my mail when ZFS uses lz4 as opposed to whatever the hell Exchange uses in its binary blob.
Tracking down messages is ridiculously easy--no multi-step wizard with outputs that are difficult to parse. Just the same old commands every admin should be familiar with: find, awk, sed, grep, and maybe cut.
I remember one client that would call me almost weekly with an "OMG WE WERE DISCUSSING FIRING A USER AND WE ACCIDENTALLY FUCKING SENT A COPY OF THE EMAIL TO THE ALL-USERS MAILING LIST". We would literally have to immediately shutdown Exchange, then take the server off the network, then attach it to a test network, then bring up a test workstation with a copy of Outlook and convince Exchange we had permission to the sender's email box (even though it's off the domain), then find the offending message and Message ID, then go through 150 boxes by hand to find and remove the message and remember to purge it out of the Deleted Items box...then bring everything back online. It took *hours*.
But in Linux-land we were able to stop the mail services, cd into the 'sent items' box, find the message ID and run something simple like: grep -l 'message-id' | xargs rm
We'd run through about 800 linux mailboxes (~1.3 TB) in about 8 minutes and then be back online.
Fuck Exchange.
If your company picked Exchange, chances are they've made a *lot* of wrong decisions. Especially like hiring an incompetent IT staff.
There are zounds of free e-mail clients out there, why are you stuck with using Windows Mail is beyond me.
You & I are not typical computer users; we know that other MUAs exist; know how to find them; know how to install them. Many people would not install a different MUA; if you were to tell them to do it they would not for fear of it breaking their PC. Sad but true.
Except that Apple Mail.app, while not flawless by any stretch, is a really great mail client.
Android has some good ones too: K9 is only missing cross-account message store/move and it'd be as good as mail.app.
I've tried Microsoft Mail a few times and decided that it just doesn't work (for me.) Outlook works, for small values of work, but is the sort of obliquely painful experience that you'd expect of an unloved "legacy" technology.
Microsoft wants you to transition to MS Teams. It also doesn't work, but it's much shinier than their mail offerings and has the advantage of locking you and your content into their infrastructure.
-- Andrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claws_Mail
Multiplatform, runs circles around Thunderbird speed wise and is extensible through plugins. Doesn't allow sending HTML mail (though it can receive it) and is extremely fast in navigating mail folders or finding messages. I keep all my mail inline converted from other older clients, that is about 20 years and tens thousands mails, and it still starts in less than half a second.
I quite like Thunderbird, but my big issue with it is that it renders HTML email using the Gecko engine in the same process that contains all of my mail server login credentials and full access to my email history. I don't know if Windows Mail does this, but Apple Mail uses the same sandboxing as Safari, so if there's a WebKit bug it will crash the renderer process but without a separate privilege escalation vulnerability it can't compromise my mail client. Handling untrusted data using a massively complex renderer in process just seems like a recipe for disaster.
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