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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.
Why don't you use another client, such as ThunderBird?
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.
...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.
Thunderbird is being updated again. There has already been a new release. Even without that, it is light years ahead of Windows Mail.
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
Exchange Server has nothing to do with Windows Mail.
Now, Windows Mail is like Notepad. Basic application, doing basic stuff. Sort of "better than nothing".
There are zounds of free e-mail clients out there, why are you stuck with using Windows Mail is beyond me.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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
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.