I don't mind losing POP3, but I need access to the large number of PST files that I archive old mails to.

I haven't tested the new version (I've seen it on another machine and didn't like it) but my existing system runs around 15 email accounts, all nicely segregated and visitble. I don't want something that looks like Outlook on Android.

"I don't mind losing POP3...

Well, I certainly do. With IMAP your client only 'reflects' the data that is on the server. Sounds OK...until that email server decides to change their terms of service. Say, only keeping old emails for 2 to 3 years or so, or even change / lower the storage space limits.

POP3 downloads and keeps a permanent copy of the emails on your system. Not theirs.

I usually use IMAP, but then every so often (irregularly, sometimes with large intervals) I use a POP3 client to truly download and archive my emails on my own system.

I am NOT going to depend upon ANY service to [believe they'll] keep copies of my emails until the end of time / when *I* am ready to purge them.

I don't see why you can't archive IMAP mail to a local folder/mailbox and then it doesn't matter who deletes the original mail or when it happens.

As for lack of PST in the original post, the work around is to keep paying that subscription (see icon).

POP3 is horrible. It simply doesn't work in any situation where you need to access your mail from multiple devices (which i reckon is at least 90% of users these days).

Sure, you are reliant on your email provider with IMAP, but at least your email doesn't disappear from the server the moment you retrieve it.

If you have so little trust in your email provider, you should switch providers.

And for backups and archives you shouldn't rely on a single point of failure anyway. Set up journaling rules (auto-forwarding to an archive) or a similar method to store incoming and outgoing emails on a different server. There are better ways to achieve your goals here, because anything you do with POP3, you can do with IMAP too, with the added benefit of having an extra safeguard where emails remain on the server if things go wrong somehow.

Using POP3 is just asking for your emails to be spectacularly wiped in a catastrophic event fueled by fear and regret, if you care about your email archive you should avoid it like the plague.

I've seen people lose all of their data, and companies go out of business because of POP3. Don't use it, please don't.

Re: POP3 " at least your email doesn't disappear from the server the moment you retrieve it "

It doesn't have to as POP3 has no hand in this -- it's down to settings on your email client, which either does or does not send a delete command after retrieving the email. It's perfectly possible to retrieve over POP3 and still leave all emails on the server if your email client allows this.

I concur. I use IMAP on all my household devices except for one PC where I use POP3 to get local copies of all email. I have it set to not delete emails that are pulled down, but do delete emails off the server if I move emails to Trash on the POP3 client. This way I can manage my email without having to access my ISP's terrible web-based email interface.

I'll be looking at transitioning to Thunderbird for my home PC.

> (which I reckon is at least 90% of users these days).

Glad to be in that 10% who is happy to not have email on his phone. I POP3 out of habit. I only want to read email on my one device. Then end of day I can turn it off.

> Sure, you are reliant on your email provider with IMAP, but at least your email doesn't disappear from the server the moment you retrieve it.

IMAP means paying for more and more storage. POP3 means I automatically manage my mail storage and not pay someone to store decades of old emails. Handle my own backup thanks.

And when that IMAP supplier goes bankrupt or puts up the bills? You have to pay or move everything... IMAP can still disappear. Only difference is now the user doesn't realise that deleting that email from his phone also destroyed his desktop copies... Don't blame the protocol for bad email habits.

"POP3 is horrible. It simply doesn't work in any situation where you need to access your mail from multiple devices (which i reckon is at least 90% of users these days)."

Then leave it ALONE - many of us prefer it. Like 3D Skeuomorphic vs 2D FLATSO. "The highway" is NOT an alternative the rest of us should be forced to accept.

Note: I take advantage of the "leave mail on the server for NN days" feature in TBird and other PROPER mail clients.

Note that I personally don't give downvotes, but still note your ratios here. There's a reason for that.

"Sure, you are reliant on your email provider with IMAP..."

And THAT'S the huge issue. If you change providers (change ISP, for example), you lose your emails, don't you? With IMAP, unless you make a local repository and manually copy all your emails to those folders, you lose your emails, correct? If you downloaded with POP3 it is already done, or if you wish to sync with a POP3 client it is a single operation rather than manually selecting and copying possibly thousands of emails.

"Using POP3 is just asking for your emails to be spectacularly wiped in a catastrophic event fueled by fear and regret, if you care about your email archive you should avoid it like the plague.

I've seen people lose all of their data, and companies go out of business because of POP3."

Data is data is data. If they lost their emails then they lost data in general - which means their backup plans / systems SUCK. If they lost their quarterly reports do you blame their lack of backup solutions or their HDD which finally failed after 6 years of continuous operation?? Everyone who is anyone in tech knows that backups are *your* responsibility. POP3 data is just another thing that is necessary to back up; if you didn't make a local IMAP repository copy, and the email server at your ISP dies and takes down all your saved emails with it , will you be just as happy as blaming IMAP for not saving those copies??

I use IMAP across almost all my devices, except one. That's the POP3 client. It gets synced via POP3 occasionally and then I have permanent, local copies. It also serves the purpose (because I have it set that way) to purge all that old email flotsam that's accumulated, I don't need rapid access to 2 year-old emails, thank you very much, but I also don't want to risk them disappearing into the internet ether, either.

"I haven't tested the new version (I've seen it on another machine and didn't like it)"

I have tested it quite a bit, and it's as horrible as it looks. To the extent that I've blocked it on all our client machines as I don't want the users inadvertenty turning on the toggle to try it!

You can't even drag and drop an email on to the desktop...

What? You… What?

Sorry, I would formulate a more coherent question but ‘drag and drop an email on to the desktop’ just does not parse.

Try it. Open Outlook, pick up an email with the mouse and drag it to the desktop. You'll see the behaviour the OP is referring to.

I doubt I've don that more than once since I moved from Lotus Notes in 2003, but that's the point of this thread. Users use features in lots of different ways and those features are important to those users.

I discovered yesterday that new Teams can't alert you when a user comes back online, which was occasionally very useful to me. Why it's not there is anybody's guess, but I suppose MS knows how much it was used. I don't care if I'm in a minority of one, it was a handy feature for me.

At work, they drag the emails into the correspondence folder for the relevant client, as their way of keeping them along side scanned paper correspondence and word documents that were printed and posted out.

I gave up on it once I got EWS working in Evolution on Linux, and TypeApp on Android.

-A.

Hmm, I use a small Windows VM with the inbuilt outlook to forward Microsoft non-standard "Modern Auth" to my standards compliant IMAP(s) Mutt client.

(Similar to https://davmail.sourceforge.net/ but works).

I am hoping they don't break too much (not that I plan to update to Windows 10+ any time soon).

Correct me if I'm wrong.

The so-called new Outlook is a rebranding of the Mail & Calendar apps, which are somewhat terrible.

If micros~1 were to offer businesses the bog-standard Outlook, maybe even with extenability, I guess a lot of companies would pay for it.

Humans have their habits, and they absolutely do not want to change their habits.

Especially in IT, with non tech-savvy users, breaking habits is really disruptive (disruptive in all negative meanings one can think of).

But, what are we to expect from micros~1=?

* messing with the start menu

* ribbon menu instead of classical menu

* shoving apps from micros~1 down the users' throats for all sorts of tasks, even when other apps were already set as default for these tasks

* ... to be continued

"The so-called new Outlook is a rebranding of the Mail & Calendar apps, which are somewhat terrible."

It's more a case of it being the web version, spun out as a sort-of standalone* program

It's absolute crap currently, anyway. Plenty of features missing. Want to pin the inbox of a shared mailbox to your favourites? Tough shit - you can't! Want to be able to save emails as .msg files? Tough again! Want to be able to search for specific text within an individual email? Forget it!

*not really standalone as it runs on top of the Edge Webview runtime.

" not really standalone as it runs on top of the Edge Webview runtime "

The browser is the new OS -- one more step towards the dumb terminal connecting to the M$ "mainframe" (for a regular fee, of course).

Is tnat still allowed in the EU if I decide not to have Edge on windows, surely I do not have Edge Webview either

I'm not convinced it will happen. They tried to do the same with OneNote. They've now abandoned the new shiny version and gone back to the original.

Similarly, they've introduced the replacement for VBA in Excel. It's crap and hard to run on multiple PCs due to the security (even though there's very little you can do with it). VBA will be around for a long time as it's the main thing stopping people quitting Excel for something free.

I remember the multiple sessions with colleagues on helping them uninstall the OneNote 2016 'app' and finding and installing the actual proper OneNote 2016 application. Biggest easy-to-identify-which-version difference between the two was that in the 'app' version you can't email a OneNote page to the attendees.

Okay... am confused. So they are killing Outlook? The mail app in Office 365 is being removed?

Like people note above, how will old archived email be accessed? That PST standard has been around a couple of decades.

I am also confused about the replacement. Surely it is not the same Web app thing that is appearing on Win10\11 at the moment? A dumb web wrapper? So how does one read email on the computer when there is no internet connection?

I can only start to imagine the confusion this is going to cause with my older clients. Why does Microsoft not understand that constant change is not good. I have businessmen on my books who are not going to have the time to re-learn yet another new toy.

"I am also confused about the replacement. Surely it is not the same Web app thing that is appearing on Win10\11 at the moment? A dumb web wrapper? So how does one read email on the computer when there is no internet connection?"

All your assumptions are correct - it is the web app thing which is replacing it.

I think your confusion may be caused by starting from the assumption that MIcrosoft gives a flying fuck about what its users want or need. Abandon that assumption, and all becomes clearer! It's all going to be much better for MIcrosoft as it'll be mostly shared code with the web portal. And with a reduced feature-set, it'll be less work to maintain. As regards the users? They'll just have to put up with what Microsoft decides to give them!

Don't worry, I had worked out long ago that M$ don't care about the users. Otherwise we would not see Win10 being killed off just to sell more PCs. Hard luck to those home users who don't need a powerful PC. Guess this will bump more onto tablets to check email.

I know far too many businesses who rely on opening 10 different mailboxes all in the same window, and drag and drop emails between them.

Too much of this is about selling cloud services.

So how good are Linux mail clients, and can they handle Exchange mailboxes?

"So how does one read email on the computer when there is no internet connection?"

Now Microsoft is confused. Why would you want to read email without being served "relevant" ads or getting Copilot "help"?

I have 5 years to retire before I have to deal with this.

If that's not motivation to retire or move in to something else I don't know what is.

I'm sad that this is exactly my reaction. Another stupid Microsoft user interface misstep. To be honest, the only reason my office computer is a Windows machine, is the Office applications (purchased, not rented for subscription). And the main Office program I use is Outlook. If they hork that, there is no reason for me to keep a MS machine at all.

Which honestly, I should have binned years ago anyway. I hope this makes business put down the syringe, and give up their MS addiction. It's ugly. And unnecessary.

When I am retired, I can serenely avoid all the 'improvements' of AI intrusion, MS and Apple walled garden behavior, and simply use a nice Linux box to do what needs to be done.

The new Outlook desktop preview is missing so many features, it's nowhere near ready for the prime time. But the new Outlook functionality does work well on the web - I will say that - but I want a proper desktop client with all that it entails (importing, exporting and archiving mail - plus I want email to be downloaded and kept in local backups) if you're going to keep it on the desktop and not some PWA. But even the web version does weird things by putting storage quotas in settings and other bizarre stuff - including inline or attached images. It's just horrible.

They do seem to be pretty determined to control our data in their cloud. Whether that's a good thing for us or not.

This written with a touch of bitterness. In a moment of madness I let OneDrive start to backup my files and folders. Then found that the process included creating a whole new folder on my PC with local copies of everything that was being backed up to the cloud- already in locations on my HDD- in it. Except that some settings had stopped pointing to and some things had completely ceased to even be in their original location. .After I aborted the backup and removed OneDrive from my PC I discovered that a lot of files had gone missing. Some were in their cloud- some had empty folders in their cloud but the files were missing. Luckily I had a backup that I could quickly restore files from. This is no better than ransomware.

A co-worker discovered that after a Win10 update, all his (corporate) OneDrive files were gone - both locally and remotely! After a bit of digging, he eventually managed to recover some, but not even most. OneDrive is NOT a backup, nor is it a reliable place to put things. Sometimes they simply disappear without a trace, even when Preservation Hold Library is set to keep everything indefinitely!

Yes, I'm not taking any chances with OneDrive - or Exchange Online for that matter - and backing up that cloud .. to another cloud. I could potentially back up that cloud to another cloud and so on.

This is completely different than ransomware!

Ransomware sneaks in through the back door and extorts money from you for your data.

Microsoft boldly walks through the front door and extorts money from you for your data.

PST files are a must for enterprises, what with inbox limits and movement between mail systems. Losing COM is going to mean big trouble too.

I also mourn the passing of the TAPI interface to allow SIP phones to do caller ID lookup. Yes I know it is still hanging on by its fingernails in 32-bit Outlook but guess that’ll be gone soon too. I’ve looked for some equivalent so I can set up a contacts server for a small office but drawn a blank thus far.

TAPI is getting a bit dated and unfortunately doesn't work very well anymore (probably mostly due to neglect from microsoft).

I work with these applications quite a lot, and these days you're generally going to be limited by the functionality of your PBX or SIP server.

They will need to support some form of webhook or API to communicate call status, and then you need to connect to an API, database or file to retrieve contact information.

I personally use [1]Bubble by RedCactus (it's a Dutch company). (Disclaimer: I also work for a reseller of this software)

It works with a bunch of VoIP/SIP systems, and even more CRM systems (including custom API, database or CSV connectors).

It's a pretty efficient piece of middleware.

I see a TAPI listed under phone connectors in the software, but no documentation about it, so not sure how well that works.

They list all compatible systems though, and you can ask for custom integrations too, pricing is very reasonable for that as well.

I personally only know other products where the CRM integration is part of their softphone, so it can't be used seperately.

[1] https://www.redcactus.cloud/en/

I'd actually say PST files are a must not for enterprises. From their introduction nearly 30 years ago they have been a dumping ground for messages that people "might need later" but in most cases were never looked at again. I dread to think how much storage space is wasted with these files.

With modern e-mail storage capacity, archiving and records management PST files don't really have a place in the enterprise.

Sure.

Here's a warning to Microsoft : you do not dictate how millions of your customers work.

You've already tried and failed before. I expect you will fail again, big time. Millions of companies have processes that depend on COM + Outlook. You pull that rug out from beneath them and you're looking for massive pain in the PR department, and, who knows ? That just might be the drop that pushes a fair portion to other solutions. Mail + COM is not entirely unfeasible in the Open Source area. there's going to be a lot of upheaval by 2029.

You keep on acting as if you dictate the terms. You have erected this wall for no good reason. I'm looking forward to seeing you crashing head-first into it.

It does seem rather more than merely ironic that in order to meets its "cross-platform" ambitions, Microsoft is having to dump the features and user-customisation that came from having a proprietary application on a proprietary platform. It says a lot about Microsoft's plans for Windows that the message to customers seems to be that Microsoft applications will be equally degraded on all platforms in future.

" Some companies might want the new Outlook .. I believe Microsoft is going to use it to quickly shim in newer collaboration technologies ”

For those who don't speak Micsoftezee, a shim is a wrapper around a 16 bit process to allow it to run in 32 bit space. (I can't wait to be corrected :)

I assumed Shim was a typo. Didn't you mean to type a "t"?

No no no! He meant shiv.

Don't know during what version this was removed, but you no longer can copy/paste a meeting invite. The classic Outlook UI even shows a message telling you along those lines.

Yes, i know about making meetings recurring. Not the same for me.

The fact that they are pushing out a new one isn't going to stop them from continually fucking around with the existing one too!

The new version of outlook will only save replies in the Sent folder, so if you have any sort of folder based filing system when you reply to a message you have to then go to the Sent folder and move the reply you have just sent to the folder that the original message was in.

This is a feature of the web based outlook and AIUI the mobile app which folks have been complaining about for eons, so far Microsoft have no plans to change this behaviour.

The is because the recommended way to run email is the two folder system: Inbox and Sent Items.

Or that seems to be the way some of my clients do it... with a reliance on search to find anything.

It really seems as if Microsoft is a set of disparate groups of people, some with designers, some without, whose job it is to just keep writing code, adding features and changing stuff. These groups/teams don't talk to each other. Ever.

- We have two versions of Teams. There's Teams and there's Teams. One for business, one for personal. They look similar but don't work with each other. WHY?

- We have Windows Mail, which presumably is a replacement for OutlooK Express, now being reskinned and called "outlook". Not to be confused with Outlook or outlook.com.

- We have all manner of things just changing for the sheer fun of it. Like the file manager / Windows Explorer. You used to be able to just go to File --> New Window if you wanted two file explorers. Then it changed to the tried and hated 'ribbon menu' and there's a NEW button but you can't create a new window. You can create a new tab. OK, good but not useful when trying to drag a file between two folders.

- We have onedrive, which usually stops syncing ALL its files just because it has a problem with ONE of them. There are sometimes two Onedrive apps as well.

I'm just sick of it. The software is never refined: Micro~s.oft just remove a feature, and add another one. Just when you've learned how something works, it's replaced with something that looks slightly more modern but is entirely incapable of doing what you wanted in the first place. We are just a test bed.

Micro~ft have a track record of making largely shit software and never fixing the feature set.

>"It really seems as if Microsoft is a set of disparate groups of people, some with designers, some without, whose job it is to just keep writing code, adding features and changing stuff. These groups/teams don't talk to each other. Ever.

I suspect if they left stuff alone many of these groups would find themselves 'redundant'. Therefore there is a self-serving interest to continually muck with things. Break it so they can make a fix, both of which are worst than the original design.

The problem is the original designers made it too good and there is little room for functionality improvement. The result is a failure to innovate.

You've hit the nail on the head. It's just a self-serving forever-club. It makes them money. They *look* like they're innovating, but they're just rearranging furniture in a decrepit hotel.

Now Apple software isn't perfect either, and they kill off things that we thought were OK, but they didn't. However, their software is consistently good. It just works. Rather than come up with 25 ways of doing the same thing, with 15 of them deprecated over time, they come up with 10 ways of doing things, which are consistent over the years. And when they make a big change which breaks things, well, they're the same as Microsoft but it's usually for the better, long term. Not perfect, but they appear to have a steering committee of some sort at least.

Ok MS, fine, kill Outlook and move on to the new shiny, that's your call. Just please, don't name the new shiny "Outlook" or "Outlook NG" or any crap like that. Call it "Perspective" or "Standpoint" or something.

Why? Because I wasted way too much time trying to determine if the web page I found was referring to "Skype" or "Skype for Business" or Office vs Office 365.

You can do it... you pulled it off when IE was replaced with Edge.

They're a one-trick pony