New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left Microsoft's new Outlook will be automatically installed on Windows 10 machines as part of an upcoming monthly security release. According to a message in the Microsoft 365 message center, the application will be distributed as part of the optional Windows 10 updates on January 28 or with the security update on February 11. …
I recently started with a new org, and they use new outlook, I had not tried Notlook since 2005 or so. I just noticed there's a classic option yesterday. |For the paltry amount of mail I get, I'll suffer through it. The org uses other channels to communicate. Should the volume increase, perhaps I try the classic.
Yep. Its totally shit and I use a reg fix to remove the try new outlook button. However, have now seen they are going to start forcing it soon. With SatNav in charge at Microsoft, customer service and listening to your customers has really gone to shit.
I miss the days of an iso or msi install for office. Last one was 2016. At least then you could stay on it for years. Benefit was you could craft training that would be perfect for years and years.
Now if you attempt to do training or guides for 365, in about a month its all fucking changed. Really fucking annoying.
"What exactly is "new" outlook supposed to solve in the first place?"
Personally I believe that it being used in order to "nudge" you towards the web version.
I vehemently hate the "new" Outlook, we have in house plugins that wont or can't run on the new (cough web cough) version and I hate even more Microsofts method of forcing on us that which we don't want or ask for.
I queried an update to some software we were using at a previous employer. I couldn't see the point of the update when viewed on the dev machine and asked what it brought to the table. The head of IT and myself looked long and hard though the documentation and couldn't see anything much other than cosmetic changes listed there. No mention of performance upgrades or security fixes. Anyway as none of us liked the cosmetic changes so the roll out was put on hold pending clarification from the vendor. They came back and said we might as well apply the update now. The new GUI was going to be applied going forwards in security updates etc. so we couldn't opt out of the GUI as it would get applied at the next update whether we liked it or not, wanted it or not. We started looking for another vendor after that.
There are actually a few things that the New outlook does better than the legacy... No, I can't do it, I can't keep a straight face... It's utter garbage.
I could go on about loads of things, but the thing that gets me THE MOST is the sudden change to expected user behaviour for spell correction. Red underlined words now respond to mouse left click instead of right click (that is, when the spell check has actually managed to identify a misspelled word!) Every other application in the world - including all the other MS products are right click. WFT Microsoft! Are these changes just randomised?
Up until now, Outlook has been one of the Crown Jewels for Microsoft: It's a So-So Email client, but as a PIM tool, it's hard to beat with any single app.
New Outlook is ameanic in features, but that can be fixed if they can be bothered.
The biggest danger is what killed legacy Edge; Microsoft pushed unfinished, rapidly developing software as the default, rather than as an opt-in beta; The papercuts caught so many people, it irrecoverably damaged it's reputation - by the time it was actually production ready, nobody wanted to use it as "Edge is slow and bad"
The unspoken dangers of releasing early and often.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. However pushing the POS as Edge was in the early days to be the default was wrong in so many ways.
This is typical MS. ,.Net in the early days was awful. Was it better than VB? Not to begin with. Then and after a lot of fixes it wasn't too bad. Then... they fixed it to make it worse. that is MS through and through.
But isn't that how m$ has always operated? Release crap, slowly make it usable, then the day before the final release that makes it all good things to all people, they shitcan it for a new turd that must now slowly be polished. Win7 was outstanding* and they should have stopped there, but they didn't.
*Dissenting opinions will only be read when written on the backs of 100 dollar bills, and mailed to me.
"Outlook was the killer part of Office for many people. Word etc has plenty of workable clones but Outlook was without peer once upon a time."
True, but I would also add Excel as equally important in retaining users - particularly in business settings, where a lot of commercial programs (CRM, finance, etc) have plugins for Excel which many businesses do need, and which aren't available for other spreadsheet programs.
I can see some value in refactoring Outlook to improve security, get rid of legacy code, and streamline the interface, but Microsoft made a huge mistake, IMHO, releasing nuOutlook to business customers as early as they did. I love trying new things, and I kind of like the new interface, but so much basic functionality was broken or non-existent that the new version is unusable for me in a business context, and I quickly became soured on even attempting to use it, which is clearly not an isolated experience.
The upshot for Microsoft is that business users are likely to remain suspicious of "upgrading" Outlook for much longer than they would if the new version had been more fully baked when "released" (and boy, do I use that term advisedly).
They keep doing this. Introduce features that nobody asked for that solve nobody’s problems and take away features everybody used. It's of great benefit to Microsoft of course.
Also, Outlook was always part of Office. Now, it's free. And people who bought Office, which included Outlook. Now it's being deliberately switched for "New Outlook". It's even being renamed to "Outlook (Classic)". It's like Microsoft has been into your computer and changed things. Again.
Every email message processed by "New" Outlook is proxied through MS servers (at least for IMAP and SMTP) - which means that micros~1 AI farms get copies of everything - and if you believe them when they tell you that's not the case, I have a some great oceanfront property in Kansas for sale.
Yep.. what they don't tell you is that it CANNOT use ".pst" files.
There users are going absolutely mental, becasue all the old records for legal compliance are stored in ".pst" exported archives.
also there is ZERO way to do an export of any data in the online version.
and to top it off, now you cannot do a export, MS has a plan to start charging for archived emails & data , pius an additional charge to actually access the material.
all this is coming in 2025
Not loading .pst files is indeed a problem, but you've just reminded me of multiple user's I've had over the years who insisted that continuous access to their multi-gigabyte pst files (and this was a decade ago when 1Gb was pretty large) was business critical, but somehow never actually seemed to use them...
They aren't the same product - New Outlook is basically a tweaked version of the OWA codebase (which explains why it's missing some basic features, like ability to search within one email - in a browser, the browser would have the functionality to do that). Windows Mail is years old and was always shit (even more shit than New Outlook), and has been retired. They are now planning to replace proper Outlook (or 'Outlook (Classic)' now, in Microsofty-speak) with New Outlook.
New Outlook is better than Windows Mail (not difficult - it's a very low bar) but is way inferior to proper Outlook and still has quite a few important features which are now more difficult / doi't work properly / are missing altogether. And they are trying to pretend that this is 'Enterprise-ready' - it's a shitshow.
Microsoft forcibly switched people from the Mail and Calendar app onto Outlook so they could inject advertising into the inbox. There was no other reason for it since those other apps were completely usable as they were for the majority of people at home who just want something that hooks to their webmail.
As it is I suggest people uninstall Outlook and use Thunderbird. It's a completely free and ad free email client that works fine although I wish the default views were changed to something a bit more nice out of the box.
I don’t really know why, but many of my customers hate Thunderbird. I don’t mind it, but it does feel less ‘designed’ and more ‘evolved’. Having said that, the main issue I have with it is that it doesn’t work out of the box with Exchange. Yes, you can buy an add-on, but how long will it work for? It relies on Microsoft not changing stuff, and the developer keeping the add-on going.
Thunederbird - particularly with its default settings - simply looks very dated now. This isn't something which bothers most technies as they are interested in the functionality not the bling, but it does make a difference with 'normal' users as they are only intersted in the UI and that does now look 'old' compared to most other email clients.
I was informed a while ago while still on Win10 that I had been upgraded to the new Outlook after declining many times and then finding that one day it had been switched
Old Outlook isn't on my system anymore. I've checked. Although I have updated to Win 11 recenly and after using the command to remove the "new" Outlook I have no Oulook at all.
When I search for and then run Outlook I'm informed to wait a moment as files need to be updated, then the new Outlook opens again.
If I seach in the store I can find the old Outlook, but after the system prepares files for installing, it just waits, and waits, and waits, but never finishes installing.
I've been using various versions of Microsoft Office for many years. I have dozens of .PST files containing my email history.
I'm currently using Microsoft Office 2021 and the Outlook delivered with that release.
Is it safe? Or is the article saying that I'll sign in one morning and find my Outlook 2021 removed from the system?
I've not seen cases of it actually removing old Outlook - it installs them side-by-side, and sets the new one as the default given the slightest chance. It increasingly appears in all circumstances unless actively removed - it will pop up on a clean install of W11 24H2, even if Office isn't installed and no mail accounts are configured in any mail clients on the device. Its sounds like Microsoft is planning to replicate this behaviour with W10 (as they did previously with Coprolite).
Install Evolution with evolution-ews instead (if on losedows, you'll need to install GNU/Linux in a VM, PuTTY with Xorg forwarding and VcXsrv).
It's a nightmare to setup and microsoft has sabotaged the setup process to make it look like you can't proceed without permission (but you can if you keep going), but it's worth it; https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/EWS/OAuth2
microsoft loves to also break their servers every few months for hours at a time and then logging in fails, but otherwise it actually tends to work properly as a mail client unlike outlook.
I've used Windows for a while*, so I'm quite used to dealing with forced upgrades, and normally I just invent a new workflow and deal with it, but even I couldn't deal with New Outlook. The one that killed it for me was that when you start the program, it wouldn't tell me about missed calendar events. So I'd come back to work after a few days off, and not know that I'd need to deal with various appointments I'd missed.
* not that 'upgrades-that-are-really-downgrades' are a strictly Microsoft issue
New Outlook is STILL so feature crippled. I still cant drag a mail to task/ to do, i still can't (work out how to?) edit a message, and the pst issue is steaming dog shit - plus the right hand panel looks like someone just stuck it on to the main app window. It's getting better, and some things are better than classic, but with a user base including many "old-timers" than can barely use Teams to send a chat message (let alone know how to actually use Teams), MS are going to break a lot of enterprise productivity by foisting new outlook on users. And the sad thing is, they'll probably do it and get away with it.....
Is there a list anywhere of all the features that are missing in new Outlook ?
I use new Outlook for work and it doesn't really cause me any issues (genuinely)..
The only feature I would like to see is a "Navigate to a folder by searching for the name" feature (which is missing in old Outlook as well IIRC) ?
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