Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact 'mitigated' Microsoft's Outlook app is crashing for European users due to memory problems, Redmond has warned, and evidence suggests the problems are spreading to the US. "We're investigating an issue in which users in Europe may be experiencing crashing, not receiving emails or observing high memory usage when using the Outlook client," …
Take a look at eM Client. I have 10 mailboxed connected.
Has its own oddities - like trying to add another account with the same email address but pointing at a different mail server. The add apparently suceeds but the new account never shows up in the list..
(Was migrating my personal email off my server at home to a hosted environment and wanted to check that the inital migration had worked. eM Client silently failed to add the new hosted environment.. And no one responded to my support request)
True, and they sometimes post the most banal and pointless things to mailing lists.
A few years back, we had major problems with this at work. A few users like to write long emails and discuss everything. This was frequently started by users posting some complaint to our all staff mailing list, then everyone discussing it and clicking reply all rather than just reply.
One day, one of the users posted something about the volume of the fire alarm. Apparently it was loud enough it hurt their ears. My response, had I posted one, would have been along the lines of if you evacuated quickly when the fire alarm went off, you wouldn't be as bothered by the noise, but not wanting to start a fight that might get me fired, I didn't reply..
Of course, we had hundreds of replied to the mailing list agreeing or disagreeing and going into pages of detail to justify their opinion..
Then one of my colleagues had enough. It wasn't bothering me because after the first few emails, I put a filter on the subject so everything with that subject was junked, but he didn't do that.
He sent a reply, to the mailing list, pointing out that some of our users had very high salaries, and asking if they had nothing more important in their jobs than a fire alarm being too loud.
He was called to see our boss within the hour. Thankfully, for him, the boss agreed, but asked him to apologise to all the staff on the mailing list and warned him to think before he emailed in future.
> One day, one of the users posted something about the volume of the fire alarm. Apparently it was loud enough it hurt their ears. My response, had I posted one, would have been along the lines of if you evacuated quickly when the fire alarm went off, you wouldn't be as bothered by the noise
To divert this thread in best commentard fashion... I once complained that the fire alarm was too loud. :-)
This was because the installers had placed a siren on the ceiling at each landing in the stairwells. So, descending each flight, you had to walk under a 120dB-odd siren just a foot or two from your head. It was so painful - literally painful - I had to put my fingers in my ears which meant I couldn't hold the hand rail (another elf & safety diktat) ;-)
But mostly I argued that if there had been a fire at the foot of the stairwell requiring people to be diverted across the floor to another fire exit, it would have been impossible for a fire marshal to give instructions.
Short story short: HR did nothing.
I'm fairly certain the fire alarm in that building had been installed wrongly - it was deafening in the stairwells but relatively quiet on the floors. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, by the time you are in the stairwells evacuating you already know the alarm has gone off.
I agree about Germans with their convoluted grammar and love of hundred word sentences.
However the Spanish language is both concise and precise. While they like to converse at a hundred words per minute for several hours written communication are usually so abrupt you wonder what you did to upset them.
A locally installed desktop app starts crashing all over the world without any updates being installed. It’s almost like Microsoft have given themselves an obscene amount of control over people’s desktops and can apply a change in the cloud that crashes ‘local’ apps.
I’ve been refusing monthly cloud subscriptions and sticking to local apps and will do that for as long as possible. It’s beginning to look like that won’t matter soon. My local MS app will just be a thin client for the cloud app. Customer wants/needs and good sense won’t change that now. Dammit.
First we had Outlook (the email service) completing its migration from simple authentication to OAuth2. Plenty of support calls.
Then, the Windows Mail, Calendar and People apps were forcefully migrated to New Outlook (ie, enter your password and re-sync... very little in the way of proper migration). Lots more support calls, and some missing data.
Now the New Outlook stops, which appears to be a window to a web interface, with reliance on an Internet connection to Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft's AI and Microsoft's Ad services.
We had a user who I’ll give the nickname of Chairman (it’s not randomly chosen, he actually is the chairman and I’m anonymous for this reason) who had tried the new look Outlook a few weeks back. He hates it says itblooks like it was either designed by a three year old or for a three year old.
“Get rid of it now please”
I switch it back which brings up a feedback window.
“Do you want to add any feedback to Microsoft?”
Yes he did and got annoyed when there was limited space for him somewhat justifiably venting his spleen. I remember him writing that his grandchildren could draw better business suitable icons than those he’d seen on the screen.
Retired, and no longer having any paid support roles, I now use a Mac (having switched from Windows 12 years ago I find it far more stable and reliable than Windows ever was, though I still have a Windows VM to run the occasional program that doesn't have a Mac version). I also use the macOS' built-in Mail app for most of my email accounts, something that works fine for them all except one: that's one I have for work I do for the local college. That account has been configured by the college techs so it can only be logged into via Outlook, so I have the app for just that one account (OK, there are some hoops I could jump through to access it in Mail, but they're even more pfaff than installing the Outlook app). I set an autoforward on that mail to one of my other accounts, so I only ever need to run Outlook to send (which isn't often).
I still remember when MS deprecated their earlier email programs, sacrificing simplicity (and, probably, security) for bloat; once I got used to Outlook it was usable, but switching to the Mac's Mail app was a breath of fresh air.
Me too! How bizarre!
When I was actively doing Windows support and installing loads of dodgy third party shit my Windows pc was rubbish. I've stopped work now and have bought a mac to stream video. It's loads more reliable than my old Windows box was!
I'm flabbergasted and really can't understand why Windows is so shit!!!!!!!
Windows is so shit because they've got no direction, apart from squeezing the last penny out of their customers. They just won't stop changing stuff around, and steering people in a direction that suits Microsoft.
Windows never seems to be feature-complete. Now they're concentrating on AI stuff nobody asked for. How much of the AI stuff they're adding is simply to spy on people? More than nothing I suspect.
Yes—I have to agree with the 3 comments here as much of that has been my experience, except during my career with digital exposure (1995 & on) I was expected to be fluent on both Mac and Windows. Regardless, I still run into people who use Windows by choice, who continually run into needless pain. A colleague of mine was having Outlook issues with a project he and I were working on, so I looked up the symptoms, and sure enough—well documented glitch that MS 'gave up' on fixing. Well, we fixed the MS glitch of his for sure. We swapped out his Outlook mail client for Thunderbird. No further glitches.
Either my sarcasms on the blink (which it's not!) or you don't understand that the second AC is taking the piss out of the first AC, pointing out the differences in use case and explaining how even Windows can be reliable if all you are doing is streaming web content...
although there is more media reporting on windows issues, we have never had to tell users not to install windows updates or take any action to block them.
We have to send out such an announcement EVERY SINGLE TIME apple release a major MacOS update, because of actual serious issues which normally takes the machine offline so we can't fix it remotely. Always issues that were reported to apple prior to release, but they totally bloody ignored and shipped the update anyway.
When the first user emailed support asking if they should upgrade to windows 11 we generated a report and discovered that over 10% of devices had been upgraded with not a single support ticket. Our official position was that it was up to the user if they wanted it or not, because it literally made no difference to anyone else.
However the damage of Mac updates is limited by the fact that very few users can be bothered with the hassle of updating their Mac - it asks "do you want your computer to be unusable for 20-30 minutes while it updates?" at the START of the day when you log on, because that is the obvious time to ask... Seriously Apple? They haven't got a bloody clue!
Where I sat I had a view of both CAPEX and OPEX expenditure together - a situation Microsoft normally does it damnedest to prevent.
I saw how many man hours were flat out wasted by ever changing UIs, perpetual large, nay, VAST monthly updates (also eating network capacity to the point they had to come up with a torrenting approach to patch distribution) and the never ending stream of changes which only serve Microsoft, not customers or efficiency (AI being the latest wheeze to lean on your budget, but they'll first wait until you're dependent on it) and then look at what the security team had to invest in to keep it relatively safe (without being ever certain as quite a lot lives in a cloud that WE did not control) it is a miracle that this is still deemed acceptable, certainly if you then also note that your staff is constantly distracted with popups and default news installed on Edge, you have marketing settings to manage and a vast flood of metrics leave the network without as much as an by-your-leave. And even the Enterprise version still have a game bar installed. WTF?
I am so glad I'm out of this now. We use a combination of MacOS for desktops/laptops, Linux on servers and the odd iPad and iPhone here and there which are all installed via profiles so we maximise containerisation of the data we have - and nobody gets to spy on us. If I see just how much less we waste on day to day IT it's almost obscene to run Microsoft products.
Oh it's "new outlook" so it doesn't matter because "outlook classic" still works. At least until Microsoft hobble it out of existence. New outlook is a train crash. People hate it. Most importantly, it doesn't show shared mailboxes with the same prominence as regular mailboxes, and it won't let you add their inboxes to your favourites.
Why can't that shitshow of a company ever just introduce a new piece of software that's fucking feature-complete? They just can't help themselves. Fiddling with the UI, deprecating features, changing everything around, and it's not even finished yet!
It's almost as if they have some ulterior motive. But from users' standpoints now, it just looks like that motive is just pissing people off.
I departed from Outlook many years ago when MS decided to charge £99 per copy rather than bundling it with Office. As we have seven Windows PCs in the house (including wifes & childrens' PCs) I'm damned if I'm paying £700 for an emailclient. We all moved to Thunderbird which works well for us, and then M$ changed the email security settings for 3rd party clients and also changed a bunch of Teams settings meaning that I had to spend a happy couple of hours reconfiguring everything.
It seems like M$ are fiddiling about with stuff to justify their existence. I don't need any more features, I just want the damn thing to work properly!
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