Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments Some users of Microsoft's free Outlook hosted service are finding they can no longer send or receive emails because of how the Windows giant now calculates the storage of attachments. Microsoft account holders are allowed to hold up to 15GB in their cloud-hosted email, which until recently included text and attachments, and …
This.
I have work emails going back to when I started my current business 25 years ago. And yes, I do need to keep them as I have many, many long term clients and sometimes we both need to remind ourselves of what we agreed a decade earlier.
MS really have gone all in on monetising every possible part of their OS, software and ramming cloud storage down everyone's throat, it's pushed me back to Macs for the first time since uni 15 years ago.
I've switched to Gmail after having had my Hotmail address since before MS bought them out in the 90's.
I assume at some point whichever clueless CTO has turned all things Microsoft into shareware and nagware is going to get fired, but not before MS loses significant market share to alternatives.
I refuse to support any company who forces users into subscription models, and as far as I am concerned that's more than a good enough reason to pirate the software where I can no longer purchase outright a piece of software to use on all the devices in my household. It's akin to thr entire music industry pulling all albums and singles, and instead forcing everyone into a subscription model with no ability whatsoever to own music anymore.
Microsoft have put themselves on the fast track to complete loss of consumer confidence and wholesale rejection of the brand moving forward.
It's akin to thr entire music industry pulling all albums and singles, and instead forcing everyone into a subscription model with no ability whatsoever to own music anymore.
It’s not about the diehard old techies holding out. A generation will emerge believing that the subscription model is the only way, normal way. My daughter uses Spotify and doesn’t understand why I have my own collection of music on physical media. It just doesn’t make sense to her. It doesn’t make sense to me to pay repeatedly for the same music, especially as I have already purchased the right to listen to it. So the music industry is already going down the road you describe.
This is one of those religious issues. I don't think anyone is ever persuaded, probably because there are reasonable arguments on both sides which can't be reconciled.
Years ago Bruce Schneier declared that no one ever needed to keep email messages for a year. Yet I frequently – once or twice a week at least – search through my email collection, which goes back twenty years or more (and that's despite the fact that it's in Outlook, which is horrible for searching; even the stupid mbox format would be better). Not infrequently I find important information in messages from a decade or more ago. Institutional memory is important. Personal chronicles are important.
So it depends on your threat model. I'd rather have information. Of course that has more to do with my background than with rational calculation; I was an academic as well as a professional developer for many years, and I've always lived with academics and librarians and compulsive readers. Discarding written material just seems wrong.
I have all the email for my all my work like archived for future use. And They do come handy. Because basically my work depends on past project performances, I really need to see the past regularly.
I need a better way to store and search them. Any recommendations? As you said, outlook was OK with search and now just terrible with search.
I agree.
Add up Cloud + Microsoft and it should have been expected.
If you didn't see this one coming you haven't been around long enough, or you're a director or working in school administration (as they seem to be somehow blind to the predictability of these tactics).
I remember a customer losing 2GB of highly important data from his IMAP account. No problem on the server side to be found. His laptop, however, despite being 64 bit compatible ran a 32 bit version of Windows and his local HDD was FAT32 - which had a 2GB file limit and somehow wreaked the mail dirs on the server trying to synchronize it's wrecked local mailbox.
Last year I finally got around to sorting out home email properly. I did think for a while that maybe I was being a bit too geek as who in their right mind sets up email for fun when it's virtually given away for free? This is why. That and my wife kinda likes the domain name we have. She's not a geek either.
So I'm paying £2.50 per month to Mythic Beasts to host the domain and be a mail service and so it ain't free, but then I spend more than that on beer. It "only" gives 5GB storage, but it's never gone above 500MB 'cos I have getmail picking up mail from them and saving it to a little postfix server and then cleaning off MB after 2 weeks.
Multiple getmail configs isn't going to scale well, but for a family or even small business it's doable. Postfix is free. Dovecot is free. Ubuntu is free. This is all within the capability of a Raspberry Pi to run, with as many TB of disk that you care to hook up to it. If you want webmail, shared calendar and task I've heard you could even run a Nextcloud instance on there too although that sounds a bit optimistic, but that does work nicely on an old PC or small VM. But then I guess that's not cool and cloudy, especially when MS want you to pay £80 per year, every year, forever.
Quite why anyone want to keep gigabytes of old email is another question. One that I ask my missus every so often. When I'm feeling brave...
"So I'm paying £2.50 per month to Mythic Beasts to host the domain and be a mail service and so it ain't free, but then I spend more than that on beer. It "only" gives 5GB storage,"
Google Workspace Business starter is £5 per month with 30GB storage and you can use a custom domain.
And especially with email it really helps being with one of the big names as they are less likely to end up on blocklists than smaller providers, and generally offer better security as well.
Could I recommend you start reading their Terms in full to see just how much access you're giving a third party that hails from a place that doesn't really care about your rights if ignoring yours can make them money?
No, seriously, don't take my word for it (you shouldn't anyway :) ), get yourself a decent cup of coffee and work your way through it all and the implications. Take your time, do it in sessions per day but READ IT COMPLETELY for once. As an aside, admire how carefully they avoid using the phrase "in perpetuity" by using different, less alarming formulations that yet sill have the same legal meaning.
I occasionally recommend this exercise to companies who use Google facilities. It's interesting to discover that quite often their lawyers have never gone through that exercise, and when you then make them they tend not to remain Google customers for much longer, especially those who have client confidentialiy or Intellectual Property to protect..
>> "Could I recommend you start reading their Terms in full to see just how much access you're giving a third party that hails from a place that doesn't really care about your rights if ignoring yours can make them money?"
First of all, it's a general rule in discussions that it's up to the party that makes a claim to prove it. Which you haven't done because I'm pretty sure you haven't read the T&Cs yourself. FYI: Google Workspace Business Starter is, as the name implies, aimed at businesses, and Google does not scan or otherwise use any of the data (and they also, stopped doing that with free Gmail a long time ago).
https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-whitepaper/page-6.html
"Google Workspace customers own their customer data, not Google. Customer data that Google Workspace organizations put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements. We offer our customers a detailed Data Processing Amendment that describes our commitment to protecting customer data. Furthermore, if customers delete their data, we commit to deleting it from our systems within 180 days. Finally, we provide tools that make it easy for customer administrators to take their data with them if they choose to stop using our services, without penalty or additional cost imposed by Google."
and
"There is no advertising in the Google Workspace Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in Google Workspace Core Services for advertising purposes. Customer administrators can restrict access to Non-Core Services from the Google Workspace Admin console. Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account."
>> "I occasionally recommend this exercise to companies who use Google facilities. It's interesting to discover that quite often their lawyers have never gone through that exercise, and when you then make them they tend not to remain Google customers for much longer, especially those who have client confidentialiy or Intellectual Property to protect."
The notion that Google would obtain rights or even knowledge of IP store in Google Workspace is BS, and like the rest of your post it seems to based on nothing more than conjecture rather than an actual understanding of facts. But I'm sure you can prove your claim with evidence of situations where Google has helped themselves to customer data or IP, because you wouldn't pull out your claims out of thin air. Workspace is not only certified for use with sensitive data such as health data (HIPAA), it also satisfies the DOD's IL4 level of security.
I really do feel sorry for those companies naive enough to listen to your unfounded recommendations. The last thing anyone needs is unqualified legal advice.
" Google does not scan or otherwise use any of the data "
You're saying that with a straight face? I guess you still have the "Don't be evil" slogan still on your wall too.
If there's one thing Google has demonstrated consistently for well over a decade, it's that it's a pathological psychotic psychopathic compulsively lying hoarding company. Anyone who believes otherwise is either delusional, a troll or an AC. Or all 3.
That's b***cks. Google is the goto suing target for every lawyer in the world. If what you say is true and what's stated in the policy was a lie, 100s of lawyers would be currently trying to make money out of it. Not too mention the EU and every republican US state
Especially for the cloud business, the cloud customers would sue and leave.
What's this? Another Microsoft FUD ad from the company that forcefully installs internet explorer and edge for 20+ years now?
Of course any use of IP will never be made public, that would collapse a multi-billion dollar enterprise and intercept system overnight. Ain't gonna happen.
License
Your content remains yours, which means that you retain any intellectual property rights that you have in your content. For example, you have intellectual property rights in the creative content that you make, such as reviews that you write. Or you may have the right to share someone else’s creative content if they’ve given you their permission.
We need your permission if your intellectual property rights restrict our use of your content. You provide Google with that permission through this licence.
[..]
Scope
This licence is:
- worldwide, which means that it’s valid anywhere in the world
- non-exclusive, which means that you can licence your content to others
- royalty-free, which means that there are no monetary fees for this licence
Rights
This licence allows Google to:
host, reproduce, distribute, communicate and use your content – for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere that you go
publish, publicly perform or publicly display your content, if you’ve made it visible to others
[note that the conditional does not exclude Google's own use of your IP, even if you have not made it public]
modify your content, such as reformatting or translating it
sublicense these rights to:
- other users to allow the services to work as designed, such as enabling you to share photos with people that you choose
- our contractors who’ve signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes described in the Purpose section below
Etc etc. There's a lot in there that raises questions when you read it. You also may need to read what I said again. I invite the company lawyers to go through it properly after giving them a pointed hint that there may be challenges - I will never ask any organisation or individual to believe me just on my say so, that's (a) not how I work and (b) my own lawyer would give me hell, and rightly so :). I just point at the problems they may have, and then let them evaluate the evidence. If they find all is well in the context of how they manage corporate risk, fine, that's their decision. But at least they then have all the facts, which do not favour Google, even without touching the counter-intelligence aspects.
In essence, I'm leading the horse to water. It can still choose not to drink..
You're either obtuse or dishonest by purpose. Because that quoted part of the licence agreement doesn't mean what you imply it does, which is probably why you left out the relevant part. So let me just fix that for you:
https://policies.google.com/terms (btw, these are general terms across Google services, and not all elements affect all services)
"Some of our services are designed to let you upload, submit, store, send, receive, or share your content. You have no obligation to provide any content to our services and you’re free to choose the content that you want to provide. If you choose to upload or share content, please make sure you have the necessary rights to do so and that the content is lawful."
Which means that, to allow Google to provide content which you want to share with others, you must grant Google a licence to do so. The general licence you're so afraid of does exactly that. It simply means that, if you put stuff on Youtube, you grant Google the license to publish the content. And the text is pretty clear in stating that this is for the purpose of allowing you to share that content.
Nothing of this is in any way extraordinary, and you'll find similar terms in pretty much every other service which allows you to publish content in any way. That fact that you imagine this is some kind of conspiracy so that Google can sell you business data behind your back is only more testament to your lack of grasp of legal terminology, although you already demonstrated this beyond all reasonable doubt in your last post.
There's a lot for which Google can (and should) be criticised but your claims are nothing than conjecture based on your lack of grasp of legal text. So far all you have done was digging yourself into a deeper intellectual hole. Now I feel even more sorry for those companies that were naive enough to listen to your unqualified advice on legal matters, they would have been better served by just asking Bing Chat instead.
Ah, so you ignore the fact that the benign explanations do not in any way exclude non-benign use of the information so acquired to the point that you can't even take them to court if it happens?
I hope you never get to review contracts for anyone because you seem to believe in the goodness of people. I don't. Not when it comes to contracts and terms.
Don't trust, do verify.
I'm paying something like €200/year, and for that I have unlimited email (but with 5GB max per box), 250GB of SSD storage, domain management, the ability to set up any sort of Nginx or Apache website as long as I don't run more than 50 at a time (well, at least if they need a MariaDB database) and command line access to the whole FreeBSD show so I can also run other things like Kanboard. Websites are also automatically furnished with a Lets Encrypt SSL cert about an hour after I create them and standard CMS (Joomla, WP et al) are even scanned so if you have any extension installed that is known to have a problem and you've been lazy with updating you get an automated ping from support that you ought to take care of matters.
I also do not use Microsoft Office, so I basically have one amount of money I pay plus the fees for the domains I own, and that's it. I could run my own OneDrive in that 250GB space via SFTP or WebDav (even via Cryptomator if I want to use client side encryption and rsync automation) and I still would not pay more, but *I* am in control, not some third party in a country where privacy only matters as long as there isn't any money to be made by ignoring it.
I honestly don't see me ever rejoining the Microsoft circus - I've dropped that some 10 years ago and I'm still very happy I did.
This post has been deleted by its author
This is one reason I have my own domains. Sure, they do cost a small amount per annum, but being in control of my bits is well worth it.
The other principal reason is spam control. Adding company_name@my_domain.tld to the aliases file is a great way to track the inevitable onslaught of crap that appears when providing contact info to some new, assuredly happy-to-monetize-crap-they-shouldn't-care-about company.
But that's the game plan.
Cloud operators do not like the free tier. It's a drain on resources and brings in nothing. It's PR fluff, which is fine but the goal is to tranform it into revenue.
And this is how Borkzilla is realizing the plan. Tie OneDrive and Outlook together, but of course ! It's brilliant, innit ?
Yes, for Borkzilla it is. Borkzilla gets to wax lyrical about how secure your files are and, oh by the way, given your activity in the past few months, you might want to splurge for some more OneDrive space because of all your Outlook mail that you get for absolutely nothing, honest guv'.
So, some free lusers are having a bad fur day ? Not a problem, there's another one born every second.
Hey SatNad... Your left hand department (Outlook) needs to get chummy with the RightHand crew at One Drive.
TBH, I don't hold out much hope. MS is a lost cause as far as I'm concerned. I gave you the heave-ho in 2016 and never wanted to feel the pain and anguish of going back to Windows/Orifice 200.
This happened to one of my parents accounts and I couldn't understand what was wrong with it because the stupid Outlook app that runs on the mobile phone doesn't tell you anything about what's happening or space on your account it just pops up with error (not stating what the problem was)
Even when I logged into the account on the desktop browser it wasn't clear right away what happened because it says there was 9gb available
I am a computer tech but I use Google so I wasn't aware of them doing this until now, god help people who are computer illiterate
Emails should stay with emails setting attachments as onedrive is stupid move because it's limit is 5gb but email is 15tb but without attachments it should just be 15tb across everything)
...I have no sympathy for people that treat an email server as a storage system.
In my early days (Exchange 5.5 / 2000) it was common place for information stores to fall over, PSTs to become corrupted etc etc...and like the young fuckwit that I was, I'd spend hours and hours and hours with ISINTEG etc and various PST tools frantically trying to get someones email back from oblivion. Eventually, I came to realise that I was stupid and I should be telling people to take more care of themselves and create archives of their "important" spam from the mid 90s.
These days I have a policy with my clients that states that if an information store or mailbox database becomes corrupted, I will do my level best to recover it but I will offer no guarantees and there is a cap on the time I will spent working on it. I make it clear to users with massive mailboxes that if something goes tits up (which it invariably does with massive mailboxes), there is a good chance they may never see their old email again. I will not burn up weekends and evenings trying to recover someones massive 50GB+ mailbox because they might need something from 1997. If something is legitimately important and you legitimately might need it some day, back it up somewhere else, the file server perhaps or an external drive, throw it in a safe.
Nobody leaves their mail stacked up in the porch when they're done reading it, so why leave it on a mail server?
Thank you. Good night.
The trouble with things like this is that they really hit the people who don't have very much knowledge or interest, and just want their email to work. I provide 'tech support' to various elderly family and friends, and at least one of them has been hit by this. She was completely bewildered and it took me a while to unpick exactly what had happened. She had chosen to use an MS account because it seemed a safe bet, and I'd left some backups on her Onedrive years ago when setting her computer up. Everything was well within the limits at the time. I had great difficulty trying to explain to her what had happened and quite reasonably she couldn't understand the connection between emails and some files on the computer. I'm afraid now that she will purge loads of old emails - even those she wants to keep - out of fear of something going wrong. Not wishing to stereotype but in my experience older people who rely heavily on email etc get very frightened about 'losing contact' and it's very upsetting for them when things like this happen.
I've sorted it out for now, but it does seem very mean spirited on Microsoft's part and will disadvantage those least able to adjust to it. Next time round I'll tell people to use Gmail instead.
They don't need knowledge or interest, that's why you hire experts...the problem is, and stop me if you've heard this before, "We've been doing it this way for years and it's never been a problem before".
Problems like proper email handling etc are largely cultural issues and not a technical problem. These problems usually start early on in the life cycle of a company and begin with the one or two people that set the company up and design the internal processes...if the management has never been changed, then these processes stick and eventually become a massive problem.
This is why the doors on the C-suite offices tend to revolve, because chopping and changing your c-suite on a regular basis keeps the business healthy because it allows for processes to change and improve.
If I end up sat in a meeting with a potential client that has had the same CEO, CTO, CFO etc for a decade or more, I know I'm in for a rough time...it's a major red flag...because I will be up against two massive enemies of tech...familiarity and stubbornness.
If the answer I get to "How often do you review your processes and practices?" is "Not very often, we find things that work and we stick to them", I'm outta there...because the reason I'm there isn't to fix a problem...they will never listen and I will never be able to provide them with the changes and support they need because their plan won't be to improve their processes, implement new technologies, find efficiencies etc...it will be try and slightly tweak what they already have to get it to limp on for another financial year or two. Which is a waste of time for me and probably means the budget is low.
Got this from the blue a few days ago. No idea why the account existed but vaguely recall having to create a microsoft account in order to install an early Win7 upgrade. More than 10 years ago I should think.
From: account-security-noreply@mail.msa.msidentity.com
Subject: Microsoft account security confirmation
Microsoft account Your account is closed
Dear xxxx@example.com, Your account xxxx@example.com, has been closed.
If you ever want to try again, you can create a new Microsoft account at any time. Just go to https://signup.live.com/signup to sign up.
Thanks,
The Microsoft account team
What is it about people who rant about how much a free service is costing them?
If a free service looses you business, it is your fault, not theirs. If it costs you time and money as a result of something they change, that’s just the cost of building a business on a free service.
Don’t blame them, you’re the problem, mot them
They'll reverse this if there's enough kick back. Case in point, I've got 30gb on OneDrive cos I've had it so long it was still called SkyDrive, and they got a load of push back when they tried to drop the free tier from 30gb to 5gb and so changed it if you "opted-in" to give you back the 30gb.
See also the removal of internal use software with the Action Pack, desktop OneNote being killed off then revived and a host of other u-turns over the years.
I've used outlook, outlook.com (ugh), thunderbird, yahoo, aol, gmail, and my local ISP. Once a message is read, unless it's really needed, it gets dumped. Anything over a year old gets dumped. Attachments are DL'd, reviewed, and if needs be, dumped. If an email is so important one absolutely needs to keep it, which in my opinion is about one in a thousands messages, use the good old CTRL-A, copy and paste it into LibreOffice Write or the like.
Actually them splitting out the "attachment" is potentially fraud...
Since they also handle business & legal emails for client storage, they are changing the email contents, to strip out the attachments.
Thereby tampering with the emails and changing the content...
since that content is no longer "inline" but extracted from the actual email.
in the real world an attachment to an email is NOT an attachment but inline text..., which they are both removing from and converting from the verbatim copy that went thru their systems.
there is no guarantee the email they reconstructed , is IDENTICAL to the email sent.
so in-effect they are fraudulently changing the contents of emails and misrepresenting the actual copy sent., specifically it is fraudulent ,because they do not state it is reconstructed and a misrepresentation of the actual email...
It's like me taking a 50 pound note, scraping off the ink, grinding the paper down, then reconstructing a new 50 from the material, then claiming it is genuine...
that is even before we get into are they storing the base 64 content of the email in one-drive , deliberately chewing up storage, or are they converting it back to binary, thereby potentially corrupting the verbatim copy..
Effin MS. Effin, bleeping MS.
365 was shit from day one. One Drive, annoying and pretty much useless.
And now they've combined them.
But how is this news? I noticed right away last year that in 365, that the ONLY two download options for an attachment was One Drive or the download folder. That's it. NO OTHER OPTIONS. You cannot select any place else, or folder, or anything. OneDrive or your download folder. Period.
Thank god I still had the older Outlook working. But I have to run BOTH instances at once. Why? Because 365 and the old Outlook do different things and my co-workers have no clue.
Unfair practices aside, the whole thing is typical of Microsoft having different products with similar names for 'home' and 'work'. I'm referring to the policy change where personal users with a custom domain won't be able to add other users, forcing them to move to the 'business' Microsoft 365. It'sMic one of my bugbears, like them having two separate onedrive apps, both called onedrive. Or two Teams apps, both called Teams. Now, the average consumer is going to get confused between Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 and 'Office' (though that's gone too). The thing is, most people just want to use the software. They aren't aware of whether it's personal, pro, business or whatever. It makes everything harder, even for us trying to sell Microsoft 365 to a small business who might already use the 'home' version of 365. Yes, it's more expensive because it's a different product. Yes, it has the same name.
Anyway, rant over, Microsoft needs to stop pushing people about to different products.
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