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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.
"Windows Mail is also notorious for not sending emails."
I kinda like that. Maybe I will get my coworkers to move off Exchange.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
A fucking draft huh? What fool keeps using an email client that fails to send email multiple times a week?
Why don't you use another client, such as ThunderBird?
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.
Email is de-centralized, it's an open standard and with some effort you can use it for basically everything. So they hate it. They all want you to use centralized, closed platforms with every bit of data going through their servers. They = MS, Google, FaceBook, all of them.
The fact that you need to jump through hoops meanwhile to get a sane email environment isn't at all an accident. They don't want you to use email. So fucking use it.
If Mozilla actually made a good version of Thunderbird, then Microsoft would have competition but no they have little competition so they can abuse their monopoly just like the bad old days of IE. And Microsoft wants to return to the bad old days with forced Edge usage.
...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.
I'm sure they're all on a server in HRC's basement.
What's the business case for making Windows Mail better? It's not going to sell Windows 10. It doesn't make any money on its own. It's the email analogy to Solitaire and MS Paint. It's probably just there to make sure it doesn't become an anti-trust issue if they integrate it, like Windows has always come with a (crappy useless) email client. And as such they've probably outsourced it to some shit tier support and what you're seeing is code monkeys creating a train wreck. But they don't care because everyone (except you, apparently) will either go webmail, Office 365 or use a third party client.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
>Microsoft is looking to drive users away
So they have basically become Apple.
I have never seen so companies who do exactly the opposite of what their users ask for and want from them than Apple and Microsoft....oh wait, um HP, Oracle, and IBM probably fit in there too..
Hm is it just me or do all big tech companies suck
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
So you agree?
The Windows of Mail applications - I get it now.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
AKA Outlook Express. Still using it on Windows 10.
2 things, wasn't MS forced,not asked to add that setting to allow customer to choose and use their own choices of programs? The default Program settings. 2. If they are forcing people to use a browser they don't want isn't that breaking that setting that forced on MS by the government. I think its time to revisit that anti competitive law suite again..
Jack of all trades,master of none
There's plenty of full messenging systems out there (that combine email/calendar/tasks/etc, just like exchange). Hell Colab is even open source GPLv3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers
And there's plenty of great email clients that will support these various platforms...
The fact that you think there are not is exactly what Microsoft wants you to think.
Wait...you're not an exchange admin by chance are you? ;)
Android doesn't have a working email client either. It cannot reliable delete email from a mail server. It doesn't matter if you use the stock client, the gmail app, whatever. Google only supports GMAIL.
It's no shock that microsoft is doing the same crap.
Where's the difference if the effect is the same? OK, change "hate" for "they don't care for you being able to use whatever server(s) you may like for your email".
Thunderbird is what I've been predominantly using over the last few years, whether on Windows or Linux, but it isn't without severe flaws, either. The probably most annoying: As soon as an account surpasses a critical number of messages and/or folders, notification of new messages does not work reliably anymore and I have to actively click on the bloody folders to see if there's something new even if I've configured them to be updated whenever the account is being checked for new mail...
For those times that I want or need to use Microsoft mail services, I prefer to use Tor Browser to connect to http://outlook.com/ Be aware that Microsoft will prompt for extra security info when they detect your session originates at a Tor exit node. I wish they would refrain.
I also think that the quality and choice of e-mail clients on Android is poor. That said, I've been successfully using K-9 mail for some time now, and I've somehow learned to live with its shortcomings, the most significant probably being that while it has the option for several identities it still doesn't allow to configure separate outgoing SMTP servers for them, although it has been a feature request for years now and wouldn't really need rocket science or witchcraft to implement, either.
(I'm quite sure that K-9 works with GMail accounts, too, and it even does PGP encryption, if wanted.)
The OP wasn't talking about a Windows replacement...
The problems are not specific to the mail app but mostly showcase the limitations of the "sand-boxed application" model. The whole idea of "one OS to rule them all" was idiotic from the start. Phones and pc's have very different usage scenarios, what works on one doesn't work very well on the other
Whoosh
https://xkcd.com/378/
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Windows Mail uses MAPI - remember, that awful mail sending/receiving API Microsoft created for VB programmers last century? The app needs to run in the foreground because MAPI runs in the Windows event loop instead of using threads or timers.
Whoosh
Yes because they are going to do what they have done to every email client outside of outlook, create it, move people to it, and then abandoned it. i hate it when people use any Microsoft client outside of outlook or a better 3rd party alternative . because i know with a few years Microsoft will abandoned the platform leaving those users emails stuck in some proprietary database that they cant access on what ever new mail thingy Microsoft is touting this year.
All I know is I would rejoice if Ballmer snuck back on campus and hurled a chair at Nutella.
I am not suggesting or recommending Ballmer do this, let me make that very plain; I simply acknowledge that I would experience feelings of joy over the rhetorical event, were it to occur.
If you've ever worked with real users, you'd know that isn't the case. We had Microsoft-boffins thinking the same exact thing about our "corporate e-mail" with ~15,000 users - nobody uses POP3/IMAP and it's a huge headache for Exchange to badly implement it, let's turn it off. We had a small riot on our hand from hundreds of users and even a number of Exchange-to-IMAP instances popping up.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Just wish it would happen during my lunchtime.
FTFY
Windows ME, Vista, Version 8 - Microsoft has been having problems here and there with Windows for some time. In 2015, Nadella combined their hardware efforts with the Windows Universal Platform, allowing for cross platform applications [1]. Things didn't go as hoped. While Windows 10 is popular, overtaking Win 7 by February 2018, overall PC sales has been declining. In fact, they have been losing ground for the last 6 years, with a 2.8% drop in 2017 [2].
Consumer Reports stopped recommending the entire line of Surface PCs in 2017 due to hardware concerns. These days CR rates the Surface Pro 4 positively, but they still claim Microsoft is less reliable than most brands, and Apple is the most reliable laptop brand [3]. BTW, if you're interested, Windows can be installed on a Mac with OS X's dual booting Boot Camp. Best of both worlds.
Now, Terry Myerson, the leader of the Windows and Devices Group, is leaving Microsoft. With his departure, Microsoft is creating 2 new teams that will prioritize Microsoft's cloud and artificial intelligence products. Perhaps this is an effort to appease investors [4]. With Myerson's departure and this re-prioritization, it's no surprise Windows applications like Mail are having problems. I expect more trouble across the Windows spectrum. Microsoft's head is in the clouds, and their application platform is in the sunset, rear window.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-182823659.html
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-vs-windows-7-has-microsofts-newest-os-just-reached-a-turning-point/
https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/632157/2017-saw-pc-shipments-decline-six-years-straight/
[3] {May be Paywalled} https://www.consumerreports.org/products/laptop/microsoft-surface-pro-4-384902/overview/
[4] http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/news/companies/microsoft-restructuring-windows/index.html
It was that historic moment when millions of Windows 10 users uninstalled Mail in unprecedented numbers, after one solitary anonymous coward posted on Slashdot how simple it was to uninstall
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
You can change that as I have my work Thunderbird client setup to keep the notification around for at least an hour (so I can still see it when I come back from lunch).
I'm not at work and can't remember the details, but if you look around you should find out how it is done.
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.
I was using Eudora 5 until the SSL certs being used had too large of a signing key for it to handle. I'm a bit sad, to be honest.
From TFA:
If it's not plain text then it doesn't belong in the body of an email. That's what attachments are for.
He doesn't do his credibility as a sensible and informed critic of MUAs any good with that statement. Although, to be fair, he's probably correct in saying that the current Windows mail client is a POS; they always have been.
MS, along with most of the other software vendors, are trying to force their victims^H^Hcustomers to their 'cloud' offerings and potentially never ending huge revenue stream. It may work for a few years but eventually businesses might just wise-up to the fact that running your apps on Azure, which has a tendency to go up and down with the regularity of a whore's drawers, is probably not the best way to run your business.
postfix, procmail and mutt for the win.
The Machine stops.
You may think that Thunderbird is a bit old, but it's working pretty well and don't cause any trouble.
It's not "a bit old", it's "good enough and does what you want". It has the added benefit that Mozilla have decided to leave it alone, unlike Firefox which they're determined to keep fucking up more and more until their last users decide that since it's just a crappy copy of Chrome anyway they may as well use the real thing.
If they tried, they'd undoubtedly fail miserably and end up creating an excellent product.
Have gnu, will travel.
They can't.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It's not "a bit old", it's "good enough and does what you want". It has the added benefit that Mozilla have decided to leave it alone, unlike Firefox which they're determined to keep fucking up more and more until their last users decide that since it's just a crappy copy of Chrome anyway they may as well use the real thing.
Leaving older software alone seems to be the best way to have software that works. I've been keeping a Windows 7 computer and an old Core 2 duo imac around because newer systems purposely break software, or in this case, are just Microsoft being Microsoft and screwing up.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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 have to say I use Windows Mail as my primary e-mail client without issue and I'm very happy with it. I have full-fat Outlook configured as well as part of Office 365 which I can use when I want more advanced functions but this is rare for me. I've never seen the bug with mail not sending to my knowledge though I'm now a bit wary. I do wonder if perhaps this is a case of Microsoft being lazy or incompetent with third-party e-mail services (perhaps the IMAP component) as I've only ever seriously used it with Outlook.com.
I'm probably going to get torched for this, but I am actually pretty happy with Windows Live Mail 2012. You can still download it if you search for it.
It does pretty much everything I want, and is relatively bug-free. (My biggest gripe is if sending an email to an illegitimate address [like someone who mistypes their email and I copy and paste it without looking closely], it stuffs up the send process, sometimes requiring me to force-stop the program, but this happens quite infrequently. Pretty tolerable as the main 'bug'.)
It has a great search feature (which I use a LOT), signatures can be HTML or Plain Text (which I use as 'automated messages' as well), multiple accounts each have their own separate Inbox, good filtering. The 'Junk' feature is next to useless, but not a lot out there are very good any way, if it's a real concern I'll run the account through Gmail first.
It's easy to back up (I just save the folders.) You can import and export all your accounts.
Not a lot of bells and whistles, but it actually does about all I need pretty well. Hopefully Windows doesn't break it any time soon...
what organisation on the planet with a locked down corporate image uses windows Mail???? Lots use outlook or other mail clients, in all my years I have never seen a single one that uses windows mail.
This is Slashdot. We all know Microsoft does shit like this. It's pretty much in their business model. Make default/light apps suck. Bait them toward payed solutions under their own control (i.e. outlook). Profit!
Also make those apps suck, because....more profit?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
IBM used to hold that position back in the days of the mainframe. There was no way around IBM and they knew it, and of course they behaved like they own your place.
Guess what: Their time came, and their time went. They are still big, no doubt about this, but even they had to learn that you have to treat customers like customers because else you get shown the finger and then the door.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
what the hell is wrong with these windows users.
don't use it, plain and simple, not as if it is the only email client in the world.
as if the ads weren't bad enough already (why? does MS need the extra money, really?), you have more bugs then should be normal.
just install thunderbird and be done with it, never look at this crazy default windows mail client again - there is NO reason to use it.
don't give me that BS about it being installed by default blahblahblah.
lot's of people find & use chrome, even worse, lot's of people are 'smart' enough to install crapware on their pc without any help.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
That Windows 10 Mail is so disappointing is more evidence Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner, while it chases the cloud.
Oh please, the default mail client has been going down hill since back in 1998 and the only clouds we had back then were ones in the sky and those coming out of the back of a poorly tuned diesel engine.
Every successive version of whatever mail app Microsoft ships has been worse than the previous one, and that includes its cloud efforts.
They are! The author is talking about insider builds not being perfect. Well, duh.
There is only one edition of Windows 10 that should be made public, and that is LTSB. Comes only with security patch management. No Edge, no Mail, no Cortana. Use your own apps. Take a hint, M$.
It's not dead, the maintainers are still accepting patches. What they're not doing is actively adding features. I'm disappointed by the comment recommending Mailspring because Mailspring is a commercial product which requires registration, which is the number one reason why we wouldn't want to be using the original version of Nylas Mail.
But yes, still alive, just not likely to see any major new features in the near future. And that's fine! Really, it is! Because I don't know about you but I'm tired of decent products being turned into crappy ones because someone thought that, I dunno, making links open in Edge or adding ads to the sidebar would be a really great idea...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
More likely Microsoft is looking forward to cloud-everything, and local mail clients are not part of that dream. Data collection is somewhat more difficult when you've got your own mail server.
Somewhat.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You may think that Thunderbird is a bit old, but it's working pretty well and don't cause any trouble.
Thunderbird is a spry little youngster.
All I have used for years is Eudora (the real Eudora by Qualcom not the open source wannabee Eudora).
Have you tried Eudora 7 (last version of real Qualcom Eudora)? I am still using it and haven't run into any serious problems yet.
I did use Eudora before, but for various reasons I ended up with Thunderbird, and one reason why I'm holding on to it is the junk mail filter.
But for old mail programs there's also Elm.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Mailbird
Windows Mail is unusable
Yet, the author has apparently been using it for long enough to catalog all of its flaws.
which means Windows 10 doesn't come with an email client. That's incredibly sad.
It also doesn't come with a text editor or web browser, cry me a river.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
More likely Microsoft is looking forward to cloud-everything, and local mail clients are not part of that dream. Data collection is somewhat more difficult when you've got your own mail server.
Somewhat.
You could be very much right. Regardless of their purpose, the screw up that is MS Mail says to me that it, and by extension, Windows, is not that important to Microsoft. But I could be wrong - nothing new there.
I've always thought Microsoft's had a responsibility to fix its products' problems, MS Mail included. I stand corrected.
Have you tried Eudora 7 (last version of real Qualcom Eudora)? I am still using it and haven't run into any serious problems yet.
Didn't realize it was still in production, to be honest. I'm sure it can handle the latest and greatest crypto. I will take a look. Thanks for the heads up.
No, the large companies have plenty of talent, but management always offsets this talent. I've worked with people from Microsoft who were very sharp, and from what I heard about how things work at Microsoft, my description seems to be pretty accurate. Ditto for other large companies. It's usually not the lack of talent that makes awful software. It's awful management.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.