Yeah no shit, and you do think I have a single goddamn bit of influence over my corporation’s choice of email client??
They can leech all the data they want from my employer. I don’t give a fuck. Never use company assets for personal business as an addendum.
Just be a little more careful with your own stuff, s’all.
Depends on your sector of work. Imagine you’re a therapist or a lawyer…
A lot of healthcare and education institutions use Outlook as well, so I wouldn’t be surprised if mental health or legal uses it too. There may be rules about what kind of client/student/patient information can be sent over email, and often there are healthcare/institution specific variants of the office suites which (are supposed to) meet regulatory requirements
I think the other comment applies regardless. Do work things on the work device/account and let the workplace handle any other concerns. When it comes time to discuss alternatives, you can make a case for something else
I mean it even harvests typing data and Outlook also includes calendars etc… It’s really bad.
But yes, I just suggested a re-evaluation of the use of Microsoft Outlook to my company …
What would you get them to use instead? I use Proton personally, but I doubt many companies are using it at scale.
Use geary as a client with a private company selfhosted mailserver.
A company would use a Microsoft 365 plan that includes Outlook for Office 365, not a Windows Mail app. An the MS365 agreement would come with protections of company data from sharing with advertisers.
In other words, I wouldn’t worry if my company used Outlook. But never log in to your private mailbox from a corporate device.
There are dozens of articles about mental health systems selling patient data.
People are worried about these dystopian futures, completely unaware that we’re living in one today. You can’t do anything, go anywhere, or buy anything without it being logged and sold for profit. Not without spending years of your time becoming a cyber security expert.
Cloud services who want the business of healthcare providers usually offer a separate service for customers who need enhanced privacy.
Google etc have this option.
Also Microsoft has “pay for enterprise control” for businesses. Businesses can pay for their data not to be collected or at least sent to a business controlled server.
There are different versions of Outlook depending on your subscription. Companies that do things properly, never see the problematic, “free version” of Outlook. They have very fine control over the features and data collections they enable.
Touché.
Why is your corp using the free mail app in windows??
Because it’s free in windows.
Let me introduce you to https://davmail.sourceforge.net/
Yes it works pretty fine with stupid O365. You can basically use whatever mailclient you desire with it.
pretty sure when you bring that up to your company, that another company will have access to internal communication, that they will do something against it. It’s a willing data breach.
There’s no other company with all the required certification that can replace Microsoft office suite so all corporations are stuck with it and tbh nobody cares.
This aint 365. This is a standalone thing.
Perhaps nobody in the US or in jobs with non-sensitive data cares about that. In the EU this could backfire hard against Microsoft.
Worth noting that Outlook the Office suite component, and Outlook, the freebie mail client that comes with Windows, are not the same thing. They’re just named the same because yadda yadda executives yadda yadda name recognition yadda yadda brand synergy.
Unless your employer is one of the very few that doesn’t provide Office to its users, this isn’t about the version you are required to use.
Corporations will just have a contract that guarantees no harmful use of their data and not care about the details. They just want the lines to be able to sue if there’s an issue in the future. And honestly, I don’t see the issue with companies agreeing to collect data on each other. The issue is with private life, which should never be shared on company tools.
well, as far as you use it just for your work, who cares, right? It’s the same as I’d never use Lastpass, my corp use it and even offered it for our personal use :D thanks, but no thanks! For personal use I would never use any microsoft solution.
Hey Proton how about you quit privacy-washing and actually prioritize and release feature parity products for Linux so your customers aren’t being herded onto windows’ data harvesting platform just so they can use your supposedly privacy forward products
The Linux Experiment recently interviewed the CEO who answered this question.
Basically it’s the same as anything else. Linux requires more effort to code for due to its variety of distributions, and has a significantly smaller userbase.
In short, don’t blame Proton, blame the (lack of) users.
I mean, can’t you just package your app in flatpack or even snap? Bam, your app works on 99% of distributions for little effort. That’s what Spotify does, and I’d argue they have even less incentive to support Linux than proton does
Spoken like someone who has never developed a app package
I don’t know, I’m not a developer. Lots of companies don’t make their products available on Linux, most cite similar reasoning, so it’s unsurprising. But I agree it’s disappointing. I really wish Linux was more user-friendly.
He also answered this claim, it is right for apps that aren’t stuff like Proton VPN that can’t work in a sandboxed environment. They are working on it iirc
Screw VPNs, give us everything else!
Well… A drive app will need to access the filesystem pretty in deep to support file syncing, whuch is harder to do on flatpak, their password manager is an extension so on linux too, and for the mail bridge app I think it’s already on linux. Those are all the existing proton services
Sure, as long as you don’t need any integration with other software, don’t need arbitrary IPC, and actually keep some dependencies in line with some common denominator because there’s only so much you can do with static linking (oh excuse me, distributing the shared libraries in the same package as your binaries as if it’s a new thing) once it reach the “program must actually run” part.
Flatpack and every other similar solution that are described as “works everywhere” always come with a heck of limitations.
Thunderbird, MegaSync, Bitwarden all distribute as flatpak just fine, and it covers most of the functionality of proton suite.
Ironically the only two services this list doesn’t cover: Proton VPN and Proton Bridge, are on flathub…
Last in checked email ain’t all that complex, so seems like a good match
Variety of distributions doesn’t affect the effort in coding, it adds overhead for package management. Only rarely does it require the developer to add some extra code for either an edge case or some specific library requirement.
On top of that, Flatpak and AppImage exist to solve this issue if you don’t want to deal with it.
This is a pretty rich statement coming from Proton who has very publicly given out “private” info about its users to law enforcement without even so much as a hint of resistance. I doubt they would want to spend any resources on cross platform if they don’t even back up their claim about true privacy.
Even zoom has a lazy script that packages their app in literally every possible format possible because it runs the exact same on every distro. It is not that hard. Literally the only way this doesn’t work if you hired some 3rd party MSFT dev to create some insane C++ app with pure Windows API calls instead of using a library.
That’s a bullshit excuse. Looks at Arch’s AUR. Look at Gentoo’s guru. What happens for proprietary stuff is a deb or rpm package is downloaded, extracted and files copies where they should be. That’s it. And it works, because the cornerstone of the system is libc and the kernel. And these, for the overwhelming majority of applications, behave exactly the same on all distros.
I think the bigger issue is the variety of distros that end up not being compatible. Even if you overall have a lot of Linux users if they, for the sake of argument, distribute evenly between all distros then it’s still a lot of effort to code. The only difference is that the argument will change from “Linux has a small userbase” to “Distribution X has a small userbase”.
Linux doesn’t just need more users to be worthwhile to develop for, it also needs a distro agnostic solution to run software. That or significantly reducing (or streamlining) the amount of distros so the developers would have far less configurations to account for.
Flatpaks and nix packages work on pretty much every distro.
That’s why I mentioned both 🙂
Edit : okay yea i fd up guys anything to support women was only thinking of the slezzers
Do you realize that right now there are US states trying to make publicly existing as a transgender person prosecutable as an obscene act? Or that there are states where abortion is illegal? I’m assuming you are american but that also applies to other countries. In Russia any public indication that one is LGBT is liable to get one persecuted by law and by bands of raging homophobes.
At the best of times this attitude “if you have done nothing wrong, you got nothing to hide” is naive. But these days, as the many flaws of the justice system and the raging bigotry of many people are transparent to see and widely commented on, it’s downright clueless to say something like this.
you are right i didnt remember there are good people too
I don’t want google to read emails from my doctor, or between me and my friend in a country that has an authoritarian government, or really anything. If you think you have nothing you need to keep out of the massive surveillance network most companies have become, you’re mistaken.
Is this satire ‘/s’?
I don’t use proton so forgive me if this is a stupid question…
But do you need an app? Can’t you just use whatever browser you want for their services?
Of course you can access everything through the web on Linux. I really like Proton’s web mail interface. Unfortunately, Proton does not have a Linux analog to their windows client that provides automatic file syncing. I think that what the commenter is complaining about.
There is a dedicated Linux client for Proton VPN and in my experience it integrates quite well on Debian-based distributions.
Ya no drive client is the worst, followed by the fact the VPN app lacks a ton of features compared to their windows one. I don’t care about a desktop mail app personally since I use Thunderbird.
Also, there’s Thunderbird if you NEED a fat client for your email. Except Proton’s strength is where the service is located and the security of access. Having a full copy locally on your system kind of defeats that.
If you have properly implemented LUKS I don’t see any reason that should be a concern.
Unless you also employ very strict sandboxing, a rogue app or script could read those emails from your running system while LUKS is unlocked. There are plenty of CVEs relating to code execution; an infected JPEG, browser exploit, or any number of other things could expose your Thunderbird email database or the running memory to an attacker, particularly if you use “secure” services like Proton because you’re the kind of person who would be targeted by state actors.
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You need a special app that they call a “bridge” because Proton doesn’t support normal IMAP and SMTP, so you have to use the bridge to be able to use normal email clients.
But they are now porting their webmail as a cross-platform desktop Electron app, after which they’ll just likely discontinue the bridge “for safety”. And so this issue will become moot.
I’m grateful you put “for safety” in quotes there. That’s definitely bullshit talk. I’m further grateful that I just self-host my email. I can skip the bullshit of companies making random decisions that are ultimately against my wishes.
I finally said screw it and am leaving Proton for a proper paid service. I never upgraded Proton to a paid tier because it never matured enough for me to use for real. I never once migrated contacts over to it (just a couple people who understood I was testing it).
Yea, so there’s a connection to my credit card. At least it’s with a professional org that has proper modern mail management (something post-2000), and gives you tools to manage your email.
I really wanted Proton to work out so I could recommend it to friends and family. But it’s a terrible user experience. I missed 50 emails because it keeps moving them to spam even after I set the sender as not spam. Oh, and spam management requires (according to support) logging into the web, not thru the mobile client. 🤦♂️
Can you imagine telling a customer this with a straight face and not seeing a problem with it? I’m using your app and can’t manage spam?
That sucks! I have never experienced any of these issues
What service are you moving to? I’m curious of other alternatives.
Here’s a good starting point. All of them are hosted in Europe and enjoy strong privacy protection as an extra bonus.
I mean, this is the mail service whose own docs candidly state that their mobile app “sometimes doesn’t work”. 'Nuff said.
Don’t worry, they’re preparing to discontinue all their desktop-native apps in favor of webmail (and webmail running in Electron).
After which I expect they’ll start squeezing their paying customers, since they won’t be able to leave anymore. Or sell the company, get out with “clean hands” and a wad of cash, and let someone else do the squeezing.
What part of Windows (or Microsoft software in general) is not a data collection service?
If you aren’t using an insider edition then Notepad is still safe
… for now. They’ve already replaced the old Notepad with a bloated UWP version, so it probably won’t be long before it starts sending telemetry as well.
bloated?
I think then new Notepad is just perfectly fine.
The tabs are nice, but I notice it takes 3x as long to open (TBF it’s still under a second) and take up 10x the memory (12MB vs 1.2MB), for basically doing the same thing as the old version.
Thankfully Kate is available for Windows https://kate-editor.org/post/2021/2021-05-09-kate-21.04-in-the-windows-store/
Impressive
When I look at my Pi Hole dashboard while my girlfriend’s Mac is booted, I’m surprised by how many requests are blocked, given that apple somehow has the reputation of respecting their user’s privacy.
And when she boots into Windows 10 MS’s data stealing gets downright creepy.
I am lucky enough not to have a Windows 11 PC on my network but I think I would see even more denied requests.Proprietary software is very creepy
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No shit. There’s a reason they are killing the nice and simple Windows Mail app; it allows you to sync with your email without Microsoft servers between.
Also, the biggest issue for me is the UX. I use outlook for my work email and like to separate my work and personal life, so soon I just won’t have an app for my personal email on my PC.
If anyone knows of a similar windows mail app with good touch support and without such a traditional mouse designed UI, please share it.
The new thunderbird UI looked neat and modern.
They’re still working out some kinks, but yes, the new UI of Thunderbird 115+ is pretty good.
Thunderbird has a new UI?
I’m on 115 and i dont notice anything different from how its always been… (This isnt some joke, or insult, or anything. I genuinely don’t notice anything different?)
If you update from a previous version then it configures itself to be similar to the old UI. If you do a clean install it looks very different.
fresh install on a fresh OS install.
Weird
Isn’t that more of a replacement for Outlook? It doesn’t look designed around touch like the windows mail app.
Outlook in Office (365) is the actual Outlook.
This is like the Lite Edition.
Huh? Okay, well I don’t want either of those. I want a light touch first mail app. If it is like any version of Outlook for PC, I’m not interested as it doesn’t meet what I originally asked for.
I’ve been using Thunderbird since forever. It’s not perfect but I like it better than bloated and laggy Outlook.
I thought Thunderbird was getting increasingly shitty and slower/clunky, until I realised it was actually my ISP’s mail server getting increasingly shit. This became immediately obvious the day that emails started taking 12-18 hours to land in my inbox. Reallllll handy for those time limited account reset emails. Funnily enough, they were planning real soon to outsource their email to another company for the low, low cost of just a few extra dollars a month, opt in now!
Transferred my IMAP inbox to my own domain, everything is now awesome again.
But better for touch and simpler than windows mail?
I am only using Outlook for work email.
If by “better for touch” you mean a phone app: no, Thunderbird is for your computer. In Android I can recommend FairEmail.
No, I mean like windows mail app for windows. A large screen app that can easily used with only touch. Like I said in my first comment.
Failing to read my comments and just answering the questions you want to answer is not helpful.
Sorry I missed that. I don’t think you’ll ever be happy using Windows on a touch device though. Too much relies on the traditional UX pattern, especially third-party applications.
I’ve been paying for mailspring for a few years now, and I love it. It has touch and gesture support, is open source, and is available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Its paid plan includes some nice features like email tracking - which you can’t really get from just a simple client and (needs a server to track who has opened an email and when) - and id lookup, for things like quickly seeing the LinkedIn profile of a sender not in your contacts list.
Definitely my favorite desktop client by a wide margin, and one I would recommend wholeheartedly.
Edit: Just to be clear, it’s available for free as well.
Thank you for actually reading my comment and suggesting something appropriate, though I’m not convinced by the UI images. I’ll have to test the touch support myself, but I’ll check it out.
While I don’t use it like that myself, the website touts “touch and gesture support”, so I’m assuming there’s something in there.
It is free, so give it a shot - maybe it’ll scratch your itch!
Is it a local-only client, or does it download email on their cloud servers first?
Local only.
Even if you pay for their subscription, when you get to a new computer you need to manually authenticate with each service. But, it remembers which accounts you have, so it’s faster than manually setting up each account from scratch. Basically “we know you have Gmail, xmail, ymail - tap each account to reauthenticate”
It’s a good way to have (part of) the convenience of a cloud service, while combining it with the security of local only clients.
Edit: all of this is optional, you can choose not to let their cloud service know of any of your accounts.
What especially galled me was as I was updating my laptop before flashing to Linux the new outlook will not work unless edge installed, I had just uninstalled that pile of garbage.
Ah well, at least pop_os works great 😃
If you’re still using Windows 11, they’re still collecting your data. Sure, no need to give them more, but maybe that’s the push you need to move elsewhere. There are really good options.
I’m waiting for Microsoft to bring back the option to move the taskbar to the side of the screen before upgrading to windows 11 from 10.
I may switch to Linux if IT forces the update and I can’t stop it.
Wino Mail has a pretty good UI similar to the Mail app. You can find it in the Store.
Thank you for actually reading my comment and suggesting something appropriate instead of whatever gets you the most karma (“use thunderbird/Linux!”).
I don’t know any of the alternatives that have similar UI to the Windows Mail app
But it is possible to get back the old Windows Mail app by obtaining the dumped package file for the app (either by looking for it online or leeching it from the official Microsoft Store website using store.adguard.ru) and then install it using Powershell
At least that’s what I do with one of my systems running Windows 10 LTSC, since that version of Windows doesn’t came with Windows Mail and MS Store pre-installed
Thank you for actually reading my comment and suggesting something appropriate! I’ll have to figure out how to get the package file myself, thanks!
Outlook honestly was not that bad for a while, but of course Microsoft does what Microsoft does. I’ve been using Thunderbird for about a year now and it is very full featured coming directly from outlook.
I use Outlook on my work Mac, and am forever amazed at how hard they pushed on getting me to switch to “New” Outlook, but how many features they never bothered to port over. Like, I can’t export my mailbox without having to switch it back to ‘old’ Outlook. Calendars straight up don’t work half the time and there’s no obvious button to switch from a list of events for the month, back to a monthly calendar view.
Outlook for Mac is a fucking mess. I really do need to switch over to Thunderbird.
What was the hardest thing about the transition?
Personally, i got pretty used to the focused view from Outlook. Other than missing that, it’s been pretty great.
Like all open source software, there’s more of a build-it-yourself ethos. I was able to customize it to my liking to replace most of the functions of Outlook. Someone here mentioned the focused View which was hit or miss to be honest, but it did a good job of filtering out most of the nonsense.
It took a little bit of time to get the settings, layout, and add-ons that I wanted for my workflow. The best thing about switching is honestly how quick it is, how easy it is to have all my emails open in one window with tabs, and above and beyond all, a super powerful, super quick search. I feel like modern searches across all software are doing away with Boolean operations, thinking they can replace it with AI rankings. A straightforward search that lets me find exactly what I’m looking for and nothing I’m not feels like a superpower in this day and age.
Does thunderbird support exchange protocols or just IMAP
I use if for exchange and gmail - it’s pretty robust. Plus, they are approaching completion of their mobile app which has similar capabilities
Looks like it uses IMAP. Nothing wrong with that. It is just common practive when locking down Exchange Online to tick the box in Conditional Access that disables “legacy protocols”, which includes IMAP. I’ve been using eM Client which uses EWS but doesn’t support push-mail so still on the look-out for something else.
I just checked and you’re exactly right. It does have OAuth, but uses IMAP. In retrospect, I think I did have to talk to our sysadmin when I first set it up.
I got a popup saying “wanna try the new Outlook app”? So I did and the fucking thing immediately inserted ads that resembled email into my inbox. If this is the future I’ll install Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is great!
I tried the new outlook for about 30 seconds. They injected ads into my mail.
Instantly uninstalled it.
I hope you changed your email account passwords after. What many people don’t realise is that when you fill out the “configure your email account” form, the details aren’t kept local to your PC. You are giving Microsoft the login details to your email account. This is a major departure from how Outlook and Windows Mail used to work.
So you’ve uninstalled the app, but how can you ensure they aren’t still polling your emails?
I mean, if it’s an Outlook email and not from another provider using Outlook as a frontend, it’s part of Microsoft’s ecosystem anyways. Unless your whole inbox is encrypted (and it’s probably not if it’s not being advertised as such lol), it’s on Microsoft’s servers and they have control over it anyways.
That said, definitely change the password if you just used Outlook as your email client at some point!
Well that’s the thing. The new Outlook app is now the default email program on Windows. So you’ll have people setting up their Fastmail, Gmail, GMX and countless other mailboxes on it, just like they always have.
Except this time your password is being given to Microsoft, not just the email app on your computer.
That makes sense. I always just used my email from the browser unless there’s something specific I need from an email client or the setup is employer-provided/mandated, but I guess a lot of people just go with whatever is put in front of their face first.
I use the old outlook, so M$ still has my info.
the new version of thunderbird is amaaaazzzzing
Really. It’s been a decade at least since I last tried it. It was primitive and error prone at the time.
It’s been a decade at least since I last tried it. It was primitive
the old versions were not very good, but ‘supernova’ came out a few months ago and everything improved. Its really good
Already downloaded and installed. Very quick and easy setup, easy to use and intuitive, no bs. Thumbs up. Thanks for the reminder it exists.
I Sincerely hope you logged back in to outlook.com after to reject all permissions and tear out your data/accounts
Nope. But I think I’ll do that now. Thanks for the prompt.
Gmail does the same, at least for me on mobile when I look at my promotions Inbox
You can turn this multiple inbox feature off. Then you will not have that problem anymore. I did that and now have an ad free Gmail app
Thanks for the tip!
It was so broken when I tested it that if you dragged a folder two levels deep it would disappear. Had to roll back to get that folder out.
For a few years, I had hope that Microsoft would become a respectable, user-oriented, even FOSS-friendly company, but they finally seem to have settled on AI enshitification as their main business model.
To be fair, Microsoft is a big company with various divisions. Parts of Microsoft are doing really great work in the FOSS area I would say, but really only if you’re a developer. As a general user… they do kind of suck yet.
WSL was a good start, change comes slowly to monoliths but they always have shareholder value as their defining principle so it’s a real tightrope.
Change to Linux on main PC when?
When gaming is 100% the same on Linux you’ll see more people pick it up.
It’s already happened — 90% of games will work flawlessly now on both Windows and Linux. It’s just that the remaining 10% are different on each platform, for various reasons. Pick your poison. Usually it’s those 10% that will dictate the decision for you — but the OS itself has stopped making a difference for gaming years ago.
15 years ago. But I still gotta use Windows at work.
TBH when I got this exact pop up on my last windows laptop (dell xps13) I actually panicked and installed PopOS on it.
I didn’t feel like distro hopping, I just needed it to work. I guess that shows how I feel about PopOS at the moment.
I always chuckle at the name PopOS because in Spanish that means poops. I’m sorry.
Haven’t even finished my first coffee and already I’ve learned something new today! Thanks!
And then after the coffee it’ll be time for some more popos
Hey at least you picked a great distro to settle on!
I mean… Yeah.
Thats what i thought but holy shit its so much worse.
Its not even data that is needed for outlook but like pretty much everything on your pc.
including your username and password, send in clear text
I agree with the article’s statement. How the fuck is this legal.
As someone with an iCloud account, every time I try to use Outlook it randomly deletes emails from my iCloud account. I’ve posted this multiple times on Microsoft support site with others confirming and since it’s been more than year with no acknowledgment or fix I am convinced it’s a feature not a bug. YMMV.
Just stop using it with outlook then?
I wasn’t asking for your advise but was merely pointing out experience that others may not want to repeat. I don’t use Outlook at all.
You sure you did not use POP3?
Yes I went over all settings multiple times with Outlook support. It’s a bug/feature they are not interested in fixing.
“I heard you like data collection so we put data collecting email app in your data collecting OS so we can collect data about our data collection”
spoiler
Should I make it into a ‘Yo Dawg’ meme?
Always
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It’s basically gmail. It’s a web/email server that you give your creds over to . It has an offline mode that I guess makes it an app.
Yeah they read your shit.
For consumers, yeah they scan your shit to sell advertisements to you. For Business customers —that could get real illegal real quick.
MS has much better privacy for licensed customers. It’s well documented and in their MSA.
Uninstall that shit.
Edit: if you HAVE to use Outlook (because of work, etc), use the web version of it exclusively.
I give the web version credit, it’s pretty swell.
The web version and the new version look and feel nearly identical for me. Been using it at work for 6 months now.
Or the PWA version if you’re so inclined.
What’s the privacy conscious, and future-proof way to have email, that isn’t as crazy expensive as Proton?
Yeah, that update was the final push that moved me to Linux on my primary computer. I’ve used Linux for about 20 years on everything that wasn’t my gaming PC and between the advancements made by Valve and the increasing invasive nature of Windows put an end to my relationship with Microsoft.
