Outlook is Microsoft's new data collection service

If we look at Bethesda, Activision, and Xbox game studio, given the hundreds of titles combined with some of if not the largest franchises in video games, I would be doubtful that day is coming. Something drastic would need to occur. A part of me thinks think we're further away today then we were 10 years ago.

I hear about this all the time and it's yet to happen to me. Granted I don't play many triple A online multiplayer games, but those seems to have fallen off the cliff anyways.

The other problem is video streaming. Last I checked, some of the popular platforms wouldn't serve even Full HD content to Linux clients (this despite having Widevine etc enabled).

there are dozens of us. dozens!

The big question is how are they going to do it without giving the vultures root access

an operating system capable of doing basically anything from physics simulations to movie editing is dead once people can play videogames elsewhere

isn't that something

why use Windows at all?

I wish I had the same optimism. I have a Fedora partition that gets wiped and reinstalled every release and there's always some showstopper or things are slightly worse that make me unable to commit. I'm not settling for 'slightly worse'. The display server situation on Linux is depressing.

I don't like were Microsoft is heading, but it's way too early to claim Windows is dead.

Why do feel Apple is going in the same direction as Microsoft? Do you think in 2026 Apple will be selling users data to advertisers and have spam search results show up in the Finder?

OMG I switched to Qubes OS and haven't looked back! I value privacy and operational security over gaming and smooth 4K playback. Snowden showed that, yes, we do live in that kind of world today...

previous $JOB needed to support Autodesk products. Said products only run in MS windows. Sad pikachu face ensues.

VR is still very very difficult on Linux though. I still run Windows on my gaming pc for that reason.

Windows is dead.

Yes, with WSL to keep it afloat just long enough to steal your private data before it sinks.

It use to be the case that your private data would be sold to advertisers but that model is changing with the privacy laws, user starting to not tolerate it (e.g. see poor Google search results), and moats that are starting to fall apart (e.g. Apples app store).

Just in time for the next frontier. This time, the goal is to to feed GPT models with your private data. Windows and Outlook seem like excellent funnels to do just that. The best GPT model will require the most intimate data and at the lowest price possible. MSFT is positioned to do just that.

Multiplayer and games requiring anticheat are still troublesome, some don't work at all.

When the games run however, I agree they typically run better.

EDIT: (For being downvoted about steam and now the ease of install games on linux - read my whole post. Also, I dont put steam on my linux machines specifically to have my own walled mental garden from my distraction proclivity ADHD game mind - Games are what built my career - and as much as I have loved them - as I get older, I can only play less and less)

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For me; Its harder to fall into the "Oh - Ill just intall a bunch of these old games" distractions... or "what new games can this bitch run (slaps laptop's lid)"

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Also, since Linux has evolved to effectively run an F-ton % of the internet - thousands and thousands of devs, techs, ops, indies, etc have just made the experience so much better.

When I first started with Linux in the mid-90s - I had to hire four promising consultants to help me transition a ETF process by FTP from SUN Microsystems to my company where I was head of IT, to build scripts to create manifests from SUN to us, via FTP - watch the directory, and parse the new-fangled XML that SUN was trying to establish.

Ill never forget the first call with SUN and our execs (we physically manufactured all Software Box Sets of SUN's software, manuals etc - then packaged them and shipped it - so if you bought SUNos/Checkpoint or any Intuit or certain games' companies physical products - we manufactured and shipped it)

So we were using flat files for the transfer or order information for SUN and had some wonky scripts on these four linux FTP servers.

I was not to familiar with Linux at this time - but hired Dave Sifry, Chris DiBona and some others to re-do our FTP flat file ETF process to access SUNs new XML requirement.

We didnt know what XML was at the time - and I infamously said on a call with SUN "OK let me understand. You have your current crappy etl process and you want us to rebuild our pipeline to support your new XML standard.

(The sales people were jumping up and down at me on the call because I called SUNs current practice "crappy" while I was on the phone with a bunch of execs...)

Anyway - I went to our Linux Consultants and I talked to Sifry and I said "If I were you, I'd take your team and start a Linux Support Company."

A few weeks later Sifry and I have a sit-down, and he told me that him and team had created a new company - called "LinuxCare" to offer some of the first enterprise support....

We talked about me joining, but we never came to an agreement, and I believe Dave was one of the first 100-millionaires in the linux space on paper after LinuxCare took off a bit....

(they used to be in the Macromedia building's basement level in SF after that...).

So back then, productivity came from the server side for workflows...

Now - you can achieve exceptional productivity because you're not at the Childs Table when it comes to the UI-first (windows) vs UX-first (linux) utility platform that became a desktop.

But that took decades and millions of people contributing to how Linux can be empowering.

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But if you just look at the productivity in technological evolution Linux has contributed to computing, I personally feel its a Tier-1 level contribution, and now you can just rely on FN awesome tools, for free, written by millions of smarter people than an induvidual, to make speed to deployment of anything (even if its to gaming) faster, easier and you arent spinning mental cycles on "what the fuck is /usr/sbin?" "Where the heck do I grab these dependencies from? What the FUCK is a make file?

--- Neither of the people replying to me read my whole post.

For me, i3wm makes me a lot more productive. Instead of mashing alt tab, I have dedicated hotkeys for every virtual desktop, which is dedicated to specific apps/workflows. With one hotkey I always go to the program I’m looking for. In windows I have to just mash alt+tab. But also if the window was in split screen it gets separated from whatever it was paired with, so I have to scramble to bring both windows into focus briefly so they are in front. It’s such a mess of window management.

In Linux. If I had something setup on desktop 3, win+3 takes me to it every time. No matter if that’s one window or multiple. It’s always one hot key away. And then one to get back. I never get lost in a sea of applications that look identical in the alt+tab thumbnail.

I haven’t found a way to replicate this in windows. The closest is “never group things on taskbar” so I can at least click specific firefox windows directly. But that no longer exists in windows 11, so I guess I won’t use 11.

I feel my productivity boost comes from KDE/Plasma, a surprisingly good desktop environment (DE) that's almost too configurable. The ability to tweak almost every element of the DE, especially as it relates to shortcuts, has already allowed me to move around the environment faster and more readily. Also, *nix has always had the ability to do "Focus follows mouse," and I used something similar in Windows, but it just works better in not Windows. Combine this with a superior file manager in Dolphin and an extremely configurable launcher in KRunner and I'm flying around the desktop in ways that Windows just can't. There's more too, but these are probably the biggest.

I did a contract gig for a Windows shop recently, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well everything worked. WSL2 made a lot of things soooo much easier.

Ran a small software dev shop (~100 staff) inheriting windows. My god, never again... The amount of lost productivity was insane. Soon as went out to start my SaaS company, back to Mac, without a shadow of a doubt. I might actually reboot once every few months on Mac whereas my IT manager at the windows shop suggested as a solution to some problems shutting down everytime people were finished for the day !

The windows shop was non stop hardware, software issues. Laptops (whichever brand) are absolute junk with very short lifespans. Blue screens...

To be fair, I've had similar things happen to my relatives with the iOS and Android app stores as well. Installed some random 3rd party app instead of what they wanted because it looked convincing.

very frustrating, gonna have to be on the lookout for this with family. Thanks for the tip.

Currently running Debian (Trixie to handle new hardware), as it was the first distribution I played with many many years ago, but I don't know if it's my final destination (though I don't care to "distro hop" either so).

In my experience with desktop Linux for a family set of users, only some of which are computer-savvy, LinuxMint was a really good option that provides a familiar UI/UX for Windows users, and generally "just works". I preferred mucking about with KDE and was also generally happy with Kubuntu.

You know what people hate even more though? Paying for Windows.

:%s/state/MIC/g

They can access your whole tenant and everything in it. Have had some pretty wild support calls where MSFT has had to crawl through a tenants data specifically the schedule system. It was ultra broken. They can literally just give themselves permission and roll in. If you can't your just not high enough up in a support team.

Their use of 3rd party and external tools for adjusting registry during licensing problems is wild.

On one hand we have:

sabarn01> We don't have access to that data internally. We can't access customer data outside performance metrics about the service. At least for the normal dev there is no real way to get access to what the customer does.

On the other hand we have:

Microsoft> We and 7xx Third Parties access Outlook data on user devices.

Taking both you and Microsoft at face value, we seem to have two fairly different assertions.

Customer concerns could be allayed if their shared data was fully auditable at any time by the customer. This would include what buyers of this data can see.

Contracts are great, and may even provide for some type of compensation or remedy if you know and you could prove that Microsoft was using the data they collect against their own customers, but good luck knowing/proving that.

If Microsoft uses the data they have to come up with competing products, or to time the release of their competing products, or to decide which stocks to buy or short, or to decide which companies to partner with or avoid, or which of your employees they should try to attract, or even to sell or leak privileged information to your competitors you'd never know about any of that without a whistleblower at Microsoft saying something, and that person's income and very comfortable lifestyle depends on them keeping their mouth shut. A whistleblower may also risk legal consequences themself if they ever come forward. Risking themselves, their future, and their family is asking a lot which is why whistleblowers are extremely rare.

That's part of the problem with surveillance capitalism. All the spying being done is to collect massive amounts of extremely valuable data, but very little of that data is used transparently. You simply can never know how the data being collected about you will be used against you, you can just be sure that it will be.

The reason companies are investing huge amounts of resources into collecting, storing, and analyzing every single scrap of data they can get their hands on is because doing so is making them money hand over fist. I doesn't matter if it's your data, or your company's data, they'll be using it in any and every way possible if they even suspect that doing so will give them an advantage or make them more money and their gains will almost always be at your expense.

Companies structure their relationships with Microsoft in detailed contracts

That might be so for big companies. Most smaller shops more likely just accept the (still extremely detailed) T&C's outright. That certainly structures the relationship, but I doubt there's much balancing involved.

I'm thinking of e.g. the medical lab next door, the girlfriend's gynecologist, most smaller businesses really, of which there are a ton which deal with relatively sensitive customer data.

I would imagine you have to be large enough for Microsoft to even entertain neogotiating with you.

If the majority of businesses (and employment, and communications) are small businesses.. where does that land?

I mean, I don't think that's unreasonable. You are being paid by your employer after all, and part of the deal is that you agree, to a large extent, to do things the way your employer wants.

If you think it is a big issue you can of course talk to your employer about it and see if they will change, but they're also free to disagree with you.

We have to certify every O365 service for all of these. We also have to certify all of our dependencies.

Why is it cool to pay for stuff you may not use?

Their concern is valid, but it's weird that they call it "in plain text". "Plain text" has a specific meaning of "unencrypted", whereas this is encrypted in a TLS connection. Yes, both TFA and the original heise.de article say (paraphrased) "Although it's in a TLS connection, it's in plain text." but it's just confusing to phrase it this way, especially since it becomes easy to remove the "Although it's in a TLS connection" clause, as you did in your quote.

Their objection is that the credentials are being transmitted to and stored by Microsoft at all, instead of Microsoft generating and storing an automation token / app password. That is a valid concern. But tacking on "in plain text" to it just creates confusion.

> your IMAP and SMTP username and password are transmitted to Microsoft in plain text.

I think that is not true. I think that is a lie on Proton's behalf.

When I set up the email client, it connects via OAUTH2 to the other services. It's connected as an app and not via credentials. If it connected via bare credentials, then it'd be a "legacy app" and you'd need to generate an "app password" for it, but you don't.

A charitable interpretation of "No one, and I mean no one" would be an incredibly small fraction of a percentage of people to the point of being insignificant and irrelevant to the conversation.

In this case Outlook isn't actually Outlook, it's the replacement for Windows Mail which they're now calling Outlook, not what you and I think of as Microsoft Outlook.

This is a new version of the Mail for Windows app. Outlook for Windows is free. Outlook that comes with the Office Suite is not, it costs money.

So you could have two different Outlooks on your Windows 11 computer now. Just like there could be 3(!) versions of Teams installed (Teams for Home with Friends and Family, Teams for Work or School, and New Teams for Work and School).

Me too. Another vote for them.

NextDNS Pro is also €25/year. Super reasonable and ridiculously good product.

You can also pay for Proton's services yearly and bi-annually: https://proton.me/mail/pricing

I agree. I utilize the annual plan so it's a bit cheaper.

We'd like to point out that you can connect a custom domain to a Proton Mail account, which would make you eventual migration easier. Additionally, we also offer a free email export tool: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-export-tool. Finally, Proton was created in order to make online privacy available to anyone, so we will always try to maintain interoperability as much as we can.

I'm not very tied to any of my emails. I recently did a painstaking digital purge so, switching everything over would be very easy for me.

We definitely will! Happy to hear that you are relying on our services for your business.

I concur. I also enjoy the ability to create alias emails. I do use a mail forwarding service but it's nice to be able to split things up.

New Outlook described in article is not PWA Outlook you have with "New Outlook for O365". PWA Outlook for 365 is different from this.

Part of Microsoft Problem here is they have 4 things they call "Outlook". Outlook the Consumer Desktop Application which is privacy nightmare referenced in this article. Outlook the personal free email hosting service (old Hotmail), Outlook the Business Desktop Application most people know. New New 365 Outlook which is just WebView2 Outlook.

Although I understand your point, Shoshanna Zuboff would say otherwise. We are the resource; not the product, neither the consumer.

According to her, "their" product used to be information. Then it became prediction. And now it's behavior modification, which they achieve by constantly mining us (the data we provide them).

At least IMHO, this is a more accurate depiction of the current state of affairs. Although in the end, it may be quite a similar metaphor, either way.

But you paid for the OS (or the computer it came on), so it wasn’t free.

I’m doing a heavy amount of assumption, but I’d be surprised if MS would so thoroughly piss off their enterprise users.

Then they turned the screws and locked people out of their own content

How did Adobe do this?

Don't GIMP, Paint.net, and Photopea all open Photoshop files? Lock-in sucks, but Photoshop is much easier to give up than something like Salesforce.

I do both. If I get legitimate use out of an app, I purchase it, but I also pirate a copy and store it on the NAS. I bought it and I will own a copy forever. They can just get over it. They were paid.

If you are on Windows, the antivirus might have something to do. It used to be slow for me too but I added an exception and now it's really fast, or at least fast enough so I don't perceive any significant lag.

It handles 150k messages in a folder without a sweat for me. Do you have more?

My Thunderbird profile folder is 22GB in size. I have hundreds of thousands of emails in it. The fact that it can handle all my large mailboxes is why I still use it.

yes, I used Outlook desktop for both work (2 O365 accounts with different organizations) and personal email (multiple gmail accounts). With a job change, I am no longer on O365 (new company uses hosted gmail), but I understand there is a plugin for Thunderbird to work with O365. I much prefer having the same client for all my email accounts, and Outlook worked for that purpose. It was better for O365 calendaring within the office, but it did not play well with google calendar. Thunderbird plays well with both (with a plugin for O365).

Look in your email settings for "Forwarding rules"

Those can be migrated piecemeal over time (and possibly never for those that you don't care about). Most webmail providers these days let you operate another mail account via their interface, so it is all completely integrated in a single app with no need to switch back and forth.

I think that's the largest factor. You started with Hotmail, Gmail, or iCloud depending on when you made your first account, or what phone you chose, and then... why change?

The UX is typically better, and that was especially true back when Gmail was taking over the market and introduced everyone to the concept of never needing to delete old mail. Good looking apps are available for every device, with minimal setup. Deliverability is so good most people have no concept of ending up in their contact's spam folder. It's what your friends and family are using, and its free.

Concerns like privacy or being able to change provider without losing your address are abstract and out of sight.

No, it's not. It's an OAUTH2 connection like a sane app. Proton is ostensibly lying about this credential setup. No app does that anymore.

you probably didn't intend Microsoft to have your credentials for

But you just gave Microsoft your credentials! How could you not intend that?

They're pretty clear about this: if you set up a 3rd party IMAP account, then yeah, credentials get used. If you set up an OAUTH2-capable account, then it uses that instead. That's why it's a lie, because of course if c't has some custom bespoke IMAP server, it's going to need credentials, and the user is going to intentionally hand them over so it can retrieve the mail.

Well that’s… problematic. There’s no business tier support with icloud?

In case it's helpful, https://support.apple.com/en-us/102322 has a handy bulk mail deliverability checklist and the direct email of the iCloud Mail postmaster team.

Don't you need to provide your credentials to sparkmail in order for the app to able to sync across multiple devices? how is that any different from what Outlook tried to make you do?

I use gnome evolution. It's not great but it gets the job done; much better than Claws.

I confirm the issue of delays/freezing of Claws-mail. I really liked the simple UI, but freezing too often, couldn't stand it. I had searched about it, I got some answers that's it's single threaded if I recall well.

Since you mentioned mutt and it's steep learning curve, I recommend you another TUI MTA/mail app. It's nmail (https://github.com/d99kris/nmail). Simple, Pine/Alpine like interface, has great features (for example, saving mails in sqlite - can be viewed offline). Also the developer is active and friendly, in case you find bugs or have any proposals for enhancements.

On Windows, Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com/features/mail/) is a surprisingly good option. You can just ignore the browser part, and even set up all the toolbars so that only stuff that is relevant to mail is there.

SeaMonkey has a classic UI and is basically a modern Netscape Communicator. You can ignore the rest and just use the Mail part. It's a solid email program that has worked well for about a decade now.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

What's eye opening here?

These are basically all tech support providers. I'm not saying Google is a privacy-centric company, but this effort to enumerate subprocessors is admirable.

The internet becomes a worse place when folks criticize the superficial number rather than the intent.

Yet comments here mention Steam, gaming, photo editing software, and I myself do video editing -- all of those are not going to be packaged by Debian.

Even with Qubes, you practically have a few big sandboxes holding several applications, rather than a tiny sandbox for each app

Spectrum OS is trying to do that, but is still has a long way to go

I mean, I like some key tools they make: Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code come to mind. MSN Messenger was also a huge part of my life, literally spent a lot of time with my wife over MSN in our early years of knowing each other. Microsoft is a massive company, there's loads to hate and appreciate all at once.

https://img.ifunny.co/images/cb3e3fdac1e137657a1728d9cbfc933...

Because when I use Brave at work, where I don't have Pi-hole running, I don't have to look at the 100s of popups, moving ads, fly-out videos, etc.

I couldn't care less who the money goes to. What I care about is actually being able to read a webpage.

Thanks, would like to try it out

every time someone praises EU big tech regulations here, someone from the US inevitably complains it’s just the EU being anticompetitive ... The things we learn thanks to these regulations keep proving why they’re necessary.

The thing-to-learn from the EU rollout:

The public is a stakeholder and needs to be represented by 1) folks correctly knowledgeable to do so and 2) be invested with enough weight to not be overruled by govs & corps.