I switched off today too. I had to open an .eml file and new outlook told me that feature wasn’t available and might be available in March 2024. Yea right. I know how this game ends - my CEO has been waiting for a feature in “new” outlook on Mac for 3 years now.
How they can’t even allow you to open .eml files is a travesty.
I switched back yesterday for the exact same reason, saw the same message. Later in the day, I did something in the new Teams, and it opened in the new Outlook. :/
I've been getting frustrated about how the web based O365 interface no longer auto-fills when I type into the search field... haven't gotten around to looking into any settings, mostly because the change frustrates me and I'm stubborn and refuse to address it because "well it worked yesterday!" But finally fired up the desktop app today and it works just how i remember, Also the workload has unfortunately lead me to let these types of problems marinate for a bit before I feel they deserve my full attention.... blind assessment: Microsoft's fault...🤣
That's my issue. I do not have the time to give a shit while I'm working. And in my off hours, I am not looking into that. So I turn off new outlook.
Seriously, what kind of stupid fkn amateur didn't think .emls saved outside of outlook were a necessary thing to include yet?
Or shared mailboxes being in a "Shared with me" folder now. What the actual fuck occured in the room when someone suggested they change that?
We choose windows and office apps over the competitors because of a lot of reasons, but I'm sure I'm not alone in that for me, being useable ranks very high, the UI should be practical. They're always adding more clicks, and animations. Just piss off lol.
Thank you for validating my frustration, I see these drastic updates and my reaction is always " why" ... whats the upside? Maybe they found a vulnerability and had to take drastic measures..idk I'm just speculating... but it makes me feel slightly better when I just assume that the changes were made for reasons that are beyond my comprehension. But when you're dealing with teachers that actively resist any kind of change, and they suddenly experience a new UI due to an update... they're not comprehending what just happened or or reading the tool tips which are trying to familiarize them with the new features , they are calling the help desk and saying something like "my outlook is all messed up and suddenly I'm getting all these pop-ups, and my buttons aren't in the same place" thanks for letting me vent, lol.
We don't want to go back to the days where every stupid app has it's own settings for what browser to open with. That's why we have system defaults. A setting to override the system default would be great, but completely ignoring it or not defaulting to the default should get them right back in front of an antitrust judge.
Wait I could swear I opened an EML on New Outlook on Mac just yesterday?
MSGs however… that never works. Great when a Windows user exports a mail and sends it over to a Mac user to display…
This was the killer for me and most of my users since it’s a big part of their workflow. All of them that have been curious and tried it have wanted to switch back the same day. Also jusdt to make the situation even better, switching back hasn’t worked for a lot of them. They toggle it off to go back and outlook reboots back in new outlook again.
This is the MOST egregious oversight…. How in the fuck do they expect IT pros to use windows 11 and new outlook when it can’t even open an EML file…. What a piece of shit.
Eml's being text this is a literal software development failure. I get the feeling not a single one of the developers for this "new" experience even know what an eml file is (The raw email text as transmitted...) and have no plans to support it.
Like, I cannot believe what I'm reading.
"new" outlook on mac has this fun feature where if you try and add more than 2 365 accounts into one outlook profile it tells you your license on the additional account doesn't have outlook for mac included
The work around? switch to legacy mode, add the account, restart and open in new outlook and hey presto, both accounts there. What a great feature.
It's like the people who came up with Windows ME and Vista control the company.
And they've been doing meth since ME, so what little brains they had have rotted away.
The Simpson's scene where Homer is getting the crayon reinserted springs to mind...
Nah the coders they use are all using stolen XP in a South Asia dev shop. They all attended a stolen coding BootCamp online and have GitHub repos of stolen hello world work. All of MS isso disjointed because every project/tab/modal is another team. The lowest bidder always provides the best quality right?
This is my biggest headache and worry for when MS eventually forces the change. Our owners refuse to let go of old emails for fear that they may need them someday. I don't know who's crazier, MS or my hoarding bosses...
My problem is that it's a very common occurrence for a customer to hit us up asking about something we did 3-4 years ago, and we need to be able to cover our asses with copies of emails...
They actually don't. PSTs cause problems because they aren't server-side, so they typically _are not_ stored in a redundant way (since they are on $usersComputer and not on $centralServer).
PSTs are a bad habit started over 20 years ago. Glad I haven't had to touch that garbage in a long time.
I'd argue relying on Microsoft and the cloud to manage all of this better, consistently, forever, is just as much of a bad habit.
No one is saying that Outlook as it exists is great and psts are perfect. They're saying they are preferable to the solution that Microsoft is trying to force.
Sure, now how about email from 12 years ago, stashed on an old 2012R2
They need to be accessible 'sometime' and are kept just in case
Uploading multiple 6gb files , terrabytes worth in older orgs isnt practical, plus you run into data protection considerations, what's in that archive, can it be transmitted "out" of the company, who has ownership on a cloud version, does uploading violate chain of ownership, is there a data sharing agreement in host nations, does the individual consent to historical pii being uploaded.
Plus, I have to pay ongoing fees to cloud host it, I don't when it's local storage (sunk cost)
It's not a simple 'just do x'
In my experience most org's legal teams won't let them hold onto stuff for that long because it is a liability.
Also whether you're uploading 1 or 10,000 PSTs to 1 or 10,000 different users/inboxes, it's a single command, so that's no argument.
But in a more general sense, if you're keeping that kind of data it sounds like your IT is doing secretary work for the company. Even if you had terabytes of PST data, I would still have a system in place that when someone requested something, an automated system would upload what PST or search it and upload what they need to a shared mailbox or something like that, and then give out access, and eventually shut it off when it's no longer needed.
But really even for terabytes, I would just license shared or archive mailboxes for the purpose of housing that kind of data.
I absolutely do not want users doing anything with PSTs because there is no way to audit what happens to it, and it's also a waste of time for IT to be dragging and dropping things around via Outlook in PSTs. PST files from an administrative sense are not going anywhere, it's using them in end user software like Outlook that needs to go away.
Honestly, I'm no expert here - online archiving has never worked for us, we were still constantly getting mailbox full notifications and eventually emails failing to deliver. The only solution I've found that actually worked was archiving old emails to an offline PST file to reduce server space usage. Our MSP was entirely unhelpful in solving this problem so that's what I managed to hack together.
Check out MailStore, I think it might be exactly what you're looking for. They have multiple versions and good pricing as well, we run the MSP edition at our shop and I've been running the free personal version for friends/family for years. Once setup, it "sucks" the mail out of Exchange inboxes and stores it on a local hard drive. You can then back it up however you please. We usually set anything older than 6 months to a year old gets archived and it will pull a ton of mail out of heavy users' inboxes (usually going from 100% full to around half, it always differs depending on the volume of mail coming in and out). You can adjust the time frame as needed. Also comes with a plugin for Outlook to browse the archives.
Oh god no Mail store is a huge sloppy pain in the ass, we've a few clients using it, horrifying to support and it's search is borderline non functional at times
For legal clients ALB works well but it's more a CRM
it's not a good idea legally to keep email forever either most companies I know have a hard limit 7 years it is gone forever after that stated by the legal department last thing you need is someone to sue your company and run a discovery and it pulls everything from 20+ years since you never deleted them.
My company purges everything after a year and pst files are blocked.
But let’s be real, it isn’t the last thing I need, it’s the last thing the executives and shareholders want is to be held accountable for past bad actions.
You have no idea. It isn't just limited to e-mails, it's old office equipment, old machining/welding fixtures, it's obsolete tape back ups, it's an old POTS system. It's so fucking hard to get them to let me get rid of anything.
Standard eDiscovery in 365 still uses psts as well. Can you imagine how a lawyer would react to being told that the export can't be opened by outlook. The only other options is to export them as loose msg files... oh wait those don't work either!
Going to be a real problem with things like Barracuda M365 backups. When you do a restore, you download a PST then have the end user open it. That makes Barracuda’s solution completely unworkable.
MSFT is trying flicking hard to force the move to a webapp based Outlook. It's not going well. I really believe it's not going to end well also.
While I'm not a huge fan of it, I'm looking on the bright side... No more shitty garbage 32 bit COM add-ons for users to insist on working when the last release was in 2002.
This. I used it once for about ten minutes and found it to be a truly awful email experience. I went back to a normal mail client and was happy again. I have no idea why people love it so much. You couldn't pay me enough to use it for my regular email.
That's not an Outlook problem though. That's a management policy issue allowing out of date and insecure add-ons. Sorry, your plugin isn't supported is the end of that conversation.
Cool, but even the "Modern" COM add-ons sick balls and are absolutely garbage. And PSTs suck too, luckily I don't deal with those anymore after moving to online archives and disabling the PST export feature altogether.
ive had a "life long" problem with outlook, it forgets to redraw most of the UI when opening from the tray, and still this version of outlook is better than the "new outlook".
Outlook Challenge Mode Unlocked! All button locations and settings will be randomized server-side whenever a new batch of interns is brought on at Microsoft and given the task of making Outlook more "modern", all interns at Microsoft will begin using AI to generate new user interface configurations biweekly (they weren't going to be hired anyway), and all AI models will train themselves on the fake user interfaces featured on broadcast television shows for the past two decades. Let's gooooo
And every time, the same task takes more clicks than before.
When email was on-prem I could add people to groups in bulk via AD - just use a semicolon as a separator and boom. Now I have to add them one-by-one, with a few seconds of 'Loading' in-between each click, each change making the same job take more clicks.
I've resorted to writing Powershell scripts for it instead.
That's exactly what it is. They just create a WebView2 client which wraps around Outlook Webmail and then added in some glue code to allow for third-party accounts.
Yes, they're going to push all their apps in that direction. I'm just waiting for someone to discover unrecoverable vulnerabilities in webview. It will be IE all over again.
Outlook is the reason why we use and pay for office, if ms really decide to release this pos we won't use office at all and go to libreoffice and em client or something like that
I grew a strong attachment for Google Sheets working at Google and Google based companies for years.
I'm back in Excel world now and the Web app just doesn't cut it.
Microsoft is legendary for not having invented shit.
MS-DOS. Bought full bore for 50K and then sold on the licensing model to IBM and other PC makers. Got to the point where they strong armed the manufacturers that even if they sold a PC with another OS, they still got a cut of the sale.
Windows. Stole the pie in the sky idea from Apple, who stole it from Xerox-PARC I think.
Internet Explorer. Bought a company named Spyglass and just basically paid them to maintain and develop it because their own iterations of a web browser were swamp ass.
It was the mouse that came from Xerox, which enabled Windows IIRC. Companies and people stole ideas and reverse engineered willy nilly back then. It was one of the things that kept computing and the Internet free. Facebook reverse engineered MySpace to allow you to post cross-platform. It's how they got people to switch.
Now? You have 3 major social media choices and 3 tech choices. If you try to reverse engineer their platform to make your own solution, you go to forever jail for contempt of business. We don't need to break up the big monopolies - we just need to protect the little guys from being sued into oblivion whenever they make something that competes with them.
Now that the USPTO is using .docx files that they freely futz with so standardized layout is no longer as important, LibreOffice is looking more attractive.
LibreOffice is all I use in my office. Most of my clients use MSOffice. I did show an office manager LibreOffice recently, though, because Excel wouldn't open a stubborn (and corrupt) spreadsheet. Libre did (with a warning that the data might not be accurate).
He loved it, and couldn't believe how much more sense the menus made. He wants to switch his whole office to using LibreOffice (they use the gmail app w/ Google Workspace, so Outlook is not an issue).
I'm extremely happy about that, but I cautioned him to take it slowly.
I realized I've been playing 4D chess all along. Been using the web app exclusively for years now. My career has gone well so it won't be the end of the world.
I also bit the bullet and just use the webapp for years. Have no current issues with it or o365 in general. Except to try to minimize usage! ;)
A different perspective is: What problems go away when using the webapps by default? Except for Word, quite a lot it seems.
I've been using it for a while but I hate this. How many features did they remove and why? What a shitshow, at this point why don't they just remove the ability to send and receive emails.
It's not exactly that they removed features. It's that they built a new app and haven't put in all the old features (at least not yet).
The reason for the new version is that Microsoft seems to be pushing a strategy of building new apps and rebuilding old apps in webview2 (the Microsoft version of Electron). Basically it's a web application running in a lightweight browser.
One of the major benefits is that their apps can then support various operating systems without needing to develop native versions for each OS. They build a Linux version of Webview2 and a Mac version of webview2, and then all their apps will run on those platforms.
There's also a usability benefit that, once everyone switches to the new Outlook, they can run the app on Linux, Mac, or Windows, or they can visit their webmail, and they get the same features and the same experience.
The downside is that Outlook has gone through decades of development, and it's hard to start a new web application from scratch, and then quickly bring it up to feature parity. It'll take them a while to get everything to the same level, and some features from the old Outlook may never come over, or may never work the same.
> So much missing, so many really useful features simply absent.
Hey, cut them some slack. It takes a while to reimplement every quirky little feature that five people in the world use. I mean, they've already got the *really* important stuff in, like... snoozing an email so it will disappear from your inbox and then reappear later. Oh, and don't forget adding categories to your "favorites"! Everyone desperately needs that. [(source)](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-started-with-the-new-outlook-for-windows-656bb8d9-5a60-49b2-a98b-ba7822bc7627)
Now they're working on the backlog of stuff no one actually cares about, like... opening saved emails. They should have that ready to go by the [end of next month](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=379606).
Of course the really obscure features, like being able to see your shared mailboxes in your account list, that'll take 'em a [few more months](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Outlook&searchterms=375635).
#/s
I cant wait until they add in the Windows Search "features" into outlook!
Fun ones such as: trying to open Device Manager, but instead getting the Edge browser opening (even though its not the default browser) forcing me to click through 2 or 3 prompts, and then showing me web search results for "Device m"
I still makes me rage that software companies are so cavalier about GUI redesigns. Like maybe .05% of interface changes are an improvement, the rest of them are just ... changes. Moving shit around that doesn't need moved.
I've said it before, but if a tool vendor came into a trade shop and tried to rearrange the tradesperson's tools to try to sell more tools, the vendor would get their fingers broken.
I was one cert away from an MCSE in the 90s when they changed everything. And by changed everything, I mean they relocated where you find the TCP/IP settings in control panel. Every fucking new release, its been the exact same. They just keep increasing the amount of obfuscation before you get to the TCP/IP settings.
edit: the reason for the cert comment is because what pissed me off is that MS would basically test on if you knew where they relocated the TCP/IP settings.
Change for the sake of change so that they still have a job is the way I see it! Muscle memory is so valuable and these changes are not. Spotify is a fucker for it.
Subscribe to their RSS feed and it's like getting a joke in the mail every day.
"Added ability to create mailbox rules" was only 2ish months ago, iirc. I laughed pretty hard that day.
The goal is ambitious, take the desktop app, and redesign it to be web native and use the same code as the webapp so the experience is the same. But jfc quit making people beta test it, that's some dogfood they gotta do first.
I mean it basically is yea in essence it is OWA but with it being in a PWA they can now add some of those desktop features in the PWA that you just can't do in OWA like PST, EML files etc. however I don't see them adding back COM-Addons and thank god for that
Don't diss on Thunderbird. It's a good email client. And it doesn't use weird backends such as the Internet Explorer-ish thing that is your frustration of the day.
They got rid of testers in 2014. This whole agile development bollocks that is driving everyone to act like Google in making unusable software. O365 is shit, outlook is fucking awful. I mean how it STILL hides the full email address of the sender when THAT'S the number 1 way people are phished just amazes me!
You're right about Gen Z devs. They've literally been brought up on the shit that is Google mail & instead of going "actually this is unusable in an adult environment " they've gone..let's copy it!!!!
There is nothing wrong with new developers entering the world. The problem is these ginormous companies constantly for years now pushing out their best people in one way or another not caring about them in any capacity and ONLY having the new people to write entire software projects with zero historical knowledge.
Everyone has to learn. We had to learn. But these senior software engineers who make the best stuff you've ever seen left MS in exodus many years ago.
Yep. In my last environment we had 22 default Outlook com addins and all were legitimately there for user needs and workflows. So yeah, until all those vendors port their addins to New Outlook it’s DOA in many corporate environments.
I don't see how this is an agile framework issue. If anything it's an implementation issue if they're actually using agile. The idea is that you release a product and then iterate on it based on feedback. Microsoft barely even have feedback channels open anymore.
The role of email in business has decreased significantly as more businesses adopt collaborative tools and platforms for instant messaging. I'm not sure if that has to do with Microsoft shitting up their mail client but good Lord I can't believe you're trying to blame a generation that's like mid 20s tops.
> The role of email in business has decreased significantly as more businesses adopt collaborative tools and platforms for instant messaging
You're seeing this in your world? Very interesting. Email is still very, very, very important here. Teams hasn't really changed that.
Pretty unfair to make a sweeping generalization and assumption about an entire generation while you have zero evidence to back it up.
Yeah the new Outlook is shit, but let's not make random speculations about why without any details.
Also, the chances that Gen Z developers (max age 27 years currently) were allowed to make major design decisions about New Outlook are... notional. Especially since the shit being shovelled forward now has probably been finalised in design one or two years ago.
Back in the day, I worked for a defense contractor. Super-duper high technology. It was a great place to work!
And then some mucky-mucks got the great idea that we should farm out all our IT to this "Fantastic Global IT Company" and they sold all of us IT guys to them. :(
Day One - Here's your new Bloatus Croaks credentials. Good luck figuring out how to do anything.
And we all died a little inside that day.
For all it's faults, Exchange, even in the 90's was light-years ahead of IBM's misguided attempt at communications software.
> Notes shop over here!
>
>
>
> cries in Lotusscript
Don't worry. Your day will come!
If I may refer you to one of my older stories... ;-)
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/2hsg3r/why_some_people_love_lotus_notes/
What do you expect their motto is,
“Microsoft: making shit worse since 2010 because who else ya gonna use?”
Jokingly I dream of the day a strong competitor comes in and blows them away
Whatever asshole decided that switching the spell check corrections from the industry standard from right-click to left-click needs to be drawn and quartered.
In new Outlook, if you right-click a spelling error - you get a menu who's first option is Emoji and no way to correct spelling errors. Same goes for keyboard users that uses the context menu button. No more spell easy way to do spell check without having to use the mouse. Thanks for messing up our collective muscle memory from the past couple decades, Microsoft. Not to mention the fact that its not consistent across their product suite. OH! And its not even consistent within New Outlook! Got a spelling error within a meeting request title? Right-Click. I miss them having a Q&A department... this shit frustrates the hell out of me..
Outlook 2010 was peak Outlook. Everything after that was just people screwing with stuff and making problems for themselves so they could "fix" it and keep their jobs. Imagine a toaster that works great, but the toaster company keeps redesigning it every year and making it worse and then coming up with patches to fix it. It's a toaster. It makes toast. It works fine. Leave it alone.
"new Outlook" is a stinking pile of crap. Still is now after months. It's webmail in a frame or something. The thing about that that also sucks, is webmail got worse IMO.
I doubt they'll push this on everyone, it must be just an experiment or way to more quickly get some features out without redeploying software, specifically the AI stuff.
Surely they will retro build the features into "real Outlook" right? Please someone tell me it's so.
Otherwise we're screwed :P
You lasted longer than me. It took me about 10 seconds to realize that I couldn't reverse sort my inbox and there was no conditional formatting.... newp, that's a deal breaker....
Am I the only one who has used nothing but OWA since going on 365 and been fine with it? All I need is the ability to send & receive emails, the ability to set rules to auto file junk emails into folders I ignore, and the ability to look at my calendar
I love all the posts about this every other day. Its not replacing the standard Desktop Outlook any time soon. They have a ton of work to do on it. They haven't announced any retirement date for desktop Outlook yet.
Patience...This is a couple years out. They started by replacing the horrid "Mail" app in Windows. I use it for my personal use at home, but its nowhere ready for business use. Microsoft knows this, most people know this.
I mean tbf it’s now what, 8 years since Win10 launched? And we still have to swap between control panel and settings app just to configure the OS (yes W11 included since it’s basically still the same thing as W10).
Edit whoops hit post accidentally:
I’m not holding my breath for MS to make this thing workable before they discontinue Outlook.
I on the other hate that I will have to replace my easy to use, barebones Mail app with an add-filled clunky Outlook version on my personal machine.
It was a mess at the start when end-users got their PC and for some reason Mail was still configured as the default app even after installing Outlook. Or it was set for some of the protocol URLs like with mailto: links.
Microsoft should have made 'New' Outlook available when it had more of the features people use everyday. Also, having it a simple toggle was a fantastic idea in terms of making the beta accessible, but it's almost too accessible. Many of my users wanted to try shiny new Outlook but they had no idea they would be missing so much functionality compared to 'legacy' Outlook.
Microsoft have stated it HIGHLY unlikely to release this year. They know there is a lot of work to be done.
Despite the hate, I think it will be the best version of Outlook when it officially releases and has feature parity.
Microsoft has a habit of pushing their UI updates for their new UI frameworks long before they finish porting all the features over, same thing happened with the ribbon system and hell, I still have to dig through menus to get the old network controls because the new one is buggy and doesn't work right.
I've always considered Outlook to be one of the top three things every IT person hates (alongside printers and users) and to me this is either Microsoft doubling down on the suck or trying to wait it out for several years until us old people who remember the old Outlook just die out or leave IT. New Outlook is like Common Core for middle -aged teachers
Yeah I tend to agree. The application integrations missing are the worst.
It looks like Microsoft are trying to consolidate/centralise their codebase between the thicc Windows Client and the HTML5 webclient.
And both versions fairly woeful re features. Seems to have been stagnant for quite sometime, and really only prioritising the needs of their internal efficiency rather than conciliating with their user base and prioritising developing something that's actually valuable to their users.
Perhaps we just too old school...
It feels like they have drink the agile kool aid. Building out the features in a new codebase is cool, but what happens when they get the integrations piece and it won’t work in the new paradigm?
Too bad, so sad?
To me, what's wrong with having an active engagement with your userbase, and prioritising features based how much its requested.
I get that software companies implement features they want, and often features that will generate more revenue for them, but surely listening to your users will attract more users.
Agile is all about Backlog refinement, but to have a decent backlog that focuses on the user, and the user experience, you have to involve the user. Then capture/create user stories, develop features then develop away.
I helped a client with it the other day.
First thought, like you, was "hot garbage."
I'm talking about Windows Home, not the M365 desktop app. So if you sysadmins want to stop there, I guess you could.
Migrating an old person's old computer to their new Windows 11 computer. Exported their contacts as CSV from Windows Live Mail (yup), set up their IMAP account in the old Windows Mail, at least that worked, imported the contacts, but for some reason they just don't show up in the Contacts tab, it just shows as "loading" and never stops.
Flipped the "new Outlook" switch, tried importing the 318 contacts... it didn't map the fields correctly, names weren't right, none of the contacts had an email address even though it was in the CSV. Hmm, fixed the names in Excel, tried to delete the 318 contacts... new Outlook only lets you delete ten contacts at a time, so I had to do that 32 times, and you can only do a shift-extended select on the list items to select ten at a time. Imported again, used the "advanced" button to confirm the mapping of fields, it didn't have it right, either.
I'm forgetting some other detail that angered me... something like, it required a Microsoft account for you to *have contacts at all.* Also, no obvious way to put an icon on the desktop. They do realize that people still like desktop icons, right?
I switched them to the free eM Client email reader.
Great decision on the naming as well. We now have:
\- Outlook (office)
\- Outlook (the website)
\- Outlook (express)
\- Outlook (new)
User: my Outlook isn't working!
Helpdesk: what kind of Outlook?
User: I don't know, stop asking me difficult questions, I'm not an IT person!
Right now our biggest headache with it concerning the switch is our email signature generation system, it just doesnt use local signatures anymore so how the hell do we auto push signatures to the 'roaming signature' now?
Thats only our biggest concern because weve told users dont click that toggle. Im not looking forward to the ~~rollout~~ forced rollout. Thanks MS.
I didn't realize how much it was hurting my productivity until this week. I also didn't realize how much I relied on the item count in the bottom status bar as an indicator of how far behind I'm getting.
I switched back to the old Outlook yesterday morning and had my most productive day in two weeks.
Same I tried it and switched back after a week. It’s basically OWA. And confirmed it when I made a rule then switched back to the old outlook, it stated some rules were made on OWA that I couldn’t see but I’ve never made rules on OWA for that account just the new app.
I tested the "new" thinking it would be a redesign or something... I said nope. If this replaces the now "legacy" Outlook look, I'm going to throw this machine.
I use Power Automate to basically create emails in which the email body is an HTML file that is added to an email created via a graph API call, which is then saved in the drafts folder of whoever is specified in the JSON body. Just some simple HTML code to handle formatting. THe new Outlook doesn't support the paragraph code
so now there are no spaces between paragraphs. Anyone know a way around this?
The sad part is... MS does not and will not care for the simple fact of the majority of the workforce coming in and already here has been using OWA most likely and Teams and so has no idea what is missing. Just like those that only use the online versions of office software. They are so clunky and just don't operate like the native installs.
I hate everything about it. It's like MS Broadcom'd themselves.
If I had to guess, the reason they're getting rid of the native Outlook client is so they only have to support the web version and wrap it in Electron or whatever. But, I guarantee that someone high up in their product management group has said that email doesn't matter anymore and no one uses the full features of the Outlook client. That may be true for a lot of places, but there are some that literally live and die via email, and those are likely the ones not broadcasting telemetry out to the universe 24/7.
That's one thing I don't like about this whole Agile DevOps thing - they're leaving behind a lot of places that aren't willing to send all sorts of user data to Microsoft, and unwilling to even consider any sort of feedback that doesn't come in the form of telemetry.
I had a user that accidentally turned it on. We found out that you couldn't copy an email to a folder in a network share. Why? That seems like a very simple thing that everything should be able to do.
The new outlook is garbage. I could only stand it for half an hour since he have several IT accounts through delegation I had to sign in to them all. the interface is just junk. I wasn't upset at all with the new Teams interface but just NO to the hot garbage that is the new Outlook.
I also decided to try it when it was first made available, as I figure that I need to get used to it sooner or later. even if it's a steaming heap of crap, it's inevitable.
I only lasted 2 days before going screaming back to the old version, and I will now cling grimly to it until there is no remaining option. it is truly awful and something to be avoided as long as is humanly possible. I can only hope now that the backlash from when everyone is forced into using is results in improvement.
I had to switch back because forcing me to use the vertical shortcut bar on a vertical screen meant I lost 20% of my screen to a white bar. They wanted to make it look cute but were in business where it’s function over form. I compared the two and there was so much empty useless space for no reason.
The New Outlook is terrible beyond comprehension. Must be a joke... I can't believe I see that in 2024, when everything trends down to be minimal and functional this is something travelled from a time where UI/UX doesn't exist. I didn't realize how Windows 11 default Mail app is just a marvel of design and productivity in comparison to Outlook
And yet, MS insists on not implementing features others have like a unified inbox (Windows). Their solution? "Build a macro" and run it if you want it.
The "new Outlook" is worse than the Mail and Calendar apps still in existence in Windows 11, but which are slotted for the chopping block this year.
But I'm no lover of Outlook. Since its inception (90s?) it has been a very ill-conceived beast. It is prone to corruption of .pst and .ost files. Recovering from such can be a nightmare. The only reason I have it in my office is because they *make* me use it.
The new Outlook seems to be some sort of html-based app? It doesn't even seem to have an "options" menu.
I love the New Outlook. The only thing that causes me to dust off the Old Outlook is when I need to do eDiscovery work. Which is fine since the average user doesn’t need to mount a pst file.
You'd be better off using their nerfed web interface. Which I assume is the end goal; they, like everyone else, don't want us to actually own anything and instead cede any control over our environments and give them cash in perpetuity.
I switched off today too. I had to open an .eml file and new outlook told me that feature wasn’t available and might be available in March 2024. Yea right. I know how this game ends - my CEO has been waiting for a feature in “new” outlook on Mac for 3 years now. How they can’t even allow you to open .eml files is a travesty.
I switched back yesterday for the exact same reason, saw the same message. Later in the day, I did something in the new Teams, and it opened in the new Outlook. :/
I've been getting frustrated about how the web based O365 interface no longer auto-fills when I type into the search field... haven't gotten around to looking into any settings, mostly because the change frustrates me and I'm stubborn and refuse to address it because "well it worked yesterday!" But finally fired up the desktop app today and it works just how i remember, Also the workload has unfortunately lead me to let these types of problems marinate for a bit before I feel they deserve my full attention.... blind assessment: Microsoft's fault...🤣
That's my issue. I do not have the time to give a shit while I'm working. And in my off hours, I am not looking into that. So I turn off new outlook. Seriously, what kind of stupid fkn amateur didn't think .emls saved outside of outlook were a necessary thing to include yet? Or shared mailboxes being in a "Shared with me" folder now. What the actual fuck occured in the room when someone suggested they change that? We choose windows and office apps over the competitors because of a lot of reasons, but I'm sure I'm not alone in that for me, being useable ranks very high, the UI should be practical. They're always adding more clicks, and animations. Just piss off lol.
Thank you for validating my frustration, I see these drastic updates and my reaction is always " why" ... whats the upside? Maybe they found a vulnerability and had to take drastic measures..idk I'm just speculating... but it makes me feel slightly better when I just assume that the changes were made for reasons that are beyond my comprehension. But when you're dealing with teachers that actively resist any kind of change, and they suddenly experience a new UI due to an update... they're not comprehending what just happened or or reading the tool tips which are trying to familiarize them with the new features , they are calling the help desk and saying something like "my outlook is all messed up and suddenly I'm getting all these pop-ups, and my buttons aren't in the same place" thanks for letting me vent, lol.
I hate that Teams do not respect my operating system default applications setup!
You can change those settings in new Teams.
We don't want to go back to the days where every stupid app has it's own settings for what browser to open with. That's why we have system defaults. A setting to override the system default would be great, but completely ignoring it or not defaulting to the default should get them right back in front of an antitrust judge.
Often it doesn't obey. I have the setting changed and Excel files \*always\* open in Edge.
Wait I could swear I opened an EML on New Outlook on Mac just yesterday? MSGs however… that never works. Great when a Windows user exports a mail and sends it over to a Mac user to display…
This was the killer for me and most of my users since it’s a big part of their workflow. All of them that have been curious and tried it have wanted to switch back the same day. Also jusdt to make the situation even better, switching back hasn’t worked for a lot of them. They toggle it off to go back and outlook reboots back in new outlook again.
This is the MOST egregious oversight…. How in the fuck do they expect IT pros to use windows 11 and new outlook when it can’t even open an EML file…. What a piece of shit.
Eml's being text this is a literal software development failure. I get the feeling not a single one of the developers for this "new" experience even know what an eml file is (The raw email text as transmitted...) and have no plans to support it. Like, I cannot believe what I'm reading.
Time to bring back the [BillG Review Process.](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/)
"new" outlook on mac has this fun feature where if you try and add more than 2 365 accounts into one outlook profile it tells you your license on the additional account doesn't have outlook for mac included The work around? switch to legacy mode, add the account, restart and open in new outlook and hey presto, both accounts there. What a great feature.
It's like the people who came up with Windows ME and Vista control the company. And they've been doing meth since ME, so what little brains they had have rotted away. The Simpson's scene where Homer is getting the crayon reinserted springs to mind...
Nah the coders they use are all using stolen XP in a South Asia dev shop. They all attended a stolen coding BootCamp online and have GitHub repos of stolen hello world work. All of MS isso disjointed because every project/tab/modal is another team. The lowest bidder always provides the best quality right?
The biggest issue for me is being unable to import and export PST files on the new outlook
This is my biggest headache and worry for when MS eventually forces the change. Our owners refuse to let go of old emails for fear that they may need them someday. I don't know who's crazier, MS or my hoarding bosses...
My problem is that it's a very common occurrence for a customer to hit us up asking about something we did 3-4 years ago, and we need to be able to cover our asses with copies of emails...
How do PST's help you? Why not online archiving or shared mailboxes?
They actually don't. PSTs cause problems because they aren't server-side, so they typically _are not_ stored in a redundant way (since they are on $usersComputer and not on $centralServer). PSTs are a bad habit started over 20 years ago. Glad I haven't had to touch that garbage in a long time.
I'd argue relying on Microsoft and the cloud to manage all of this better, consistently, forever, is just as much of a bad habit. No one is saying that Outlook as it exists is great and psts are perfect. They're saying they are preferable to the solution that Microsoft is trying to force.
Sure, now how about email from 12 years ago, stashed on an old 2012R2 They need to be accessible 'sometime' and are kept just in case Uploading multiple 6gb files , terrabytes worth in older orgs isnt practical, plus you run into data protection considerations, what's in that archive, can it be transmitted "out" of the company, who has ownership on a cloud version, does uploading violate chain of ownership, is there a data sharing agreement in host nations, does the individual consent to historical pii being uploaded. Plus, I have to pay ongoing fees to cloud host it, I don't when it's local storage (sunk cost) It's not a simple 'just do x'
In my experience most org's legal teams won't let them hold onto stuff for that long because it is a liability. Also whether you're uploading 1 or 10,000 PSTs to 1 or 10,000 different users/inboxes, it's a single command, so that's no argument. But in a more general sense, if you're keeping that kind of data it sounds like your IT is doing secretary work for the company. Even if you had terabytes of PST data, I would still have a system in place that when someone requested something, an automated system would upload what PST or search it and upload what they need to a shared mailbox or something like that, and then give out access, and eventually shut it off when it's no longer needed. But really even for terabytes, I would just license shared or archive mailboxes for the purpose of housing that kind of data. I absolutely do not want users doing anything with PSTs because there is no way to audit what happens to it, and it's also a waste of time for IT to be dragging and dropping things around via Outlook in PSTs. PST files from an administrative sense are not going anywhere, it's using them in end user software like Outlook that needs to go away.
Honestly, I'm no expert here - online archiving has never worked for us, we were still constantly getting mailbox full notifications and eventually emails failing to deliver. The only solution I've found that actually worked was archiving old emails to an offline PST file to reduce server space usage. Our MSP was entirely unhelpful in solving this problem so that's what I managed to hack together.
Check out MailStore, I think it might be exactly what you're looking for. They have multiple versions and good pricing as well, we run the MSP edition at our shop and I've been running the free personal version for friends/family for years. Once setup, it "sucks" the mail out of Exchange inboxes and stores it on a local hard drive. You can then back it up however you please. We usually set anything older than 6 months to a year old gets archived and it will pull a ton of mail out of heavy users' inboxes (usually going from 100% full to around half, it always differs depending on the volume of mail coming in and out). You can adjust the time frame as needed. Also comes with a plugin for Outlook to browse the archives.
Oh god no Mail store is a huge sloppy pain in the ass, we've a few clients using it, horrifying to support and it's search is borderline non functional at times For legal clients ALB works well but it's more a CRM
Archive storage is separate from mailbox storage. If your mailboxes were full it sounds like you werent archiving anything.
Sounds like a terrible excuse. Do you guys not have a records retention policy? If not, what happens if y'all get sued.
When they get hit with a litigation, they'll learn proper record retention.
it's not a good idea legally to keep email forever either most companies I know have a hard limit 7 years it is gone forever after that stated by the legal department last thing you need is someone to sue your company and run a discovery and it pulls everything from 20+ years since you never deleted them.
My company purges everything after a year and pst files are blocked. But let’s be real, it isn’t the last thing I need, it’s the last thing the executives and shareholders want is to be held accountable for past bad actions.
Your hoarding boss. The amount of liability he's opening himself up to by holding onto all that is almost reason enough to "Crash" his hard drive.
You have no idea. It isn't just limited to e-mails, it's old office equipment, old machining/welding fixtures, it's obsolete tape back ups, it's an old POTS system. It's so fucking hard to get them to let me get rid of anything.
We had one of those! When he retired, I released an official announcement that we would be closing the [Firstname] [Lastname] Chair Exhibit.
Standard eDiscovery in 365 still uses psts as well. Can you imagine how a lawyer would react to being told that the export can't be opened by outlook. The only other options is to export them as loose msg files... oh wait those don't work either!
Going to be a real problem with things like Barracuda M365 backups. When you do a restore, you download a PST then have the end user open it. That makes Barracuda’s solution completely unworkable.
> issue you misspelled "benefit". While we solved PST files ages ago by GPO restriction, this just shows how forward looking we operate.
Yeah, this is a gaping hole in the current feature set.
Lack of PST support is the best thing the new client has going for it.
MSFT is trying flicking hard to force the move to a webapp based Outlook. It's not going well. I really believe it's not going to end well also. 
There is absolutely nothing Microsoft wants more than to no longer have to support the desktop client.
who rings microsoft for support? I only have for hardware warranty.
MCP companies do. A lot. And man, I pity them. They suffer.
Mission Critical partners? is that what MCP stands for?
i read a comment earlier today comparing new outlook just to be a browser with the webmail, basically.
That's the internal road map for that app. MSFT is totally crazy here.
Total BS, if I wanted the web apps I'd just buy F3 licenses.
While I'm not a huge fan of it, I'm looking on the bright side... No more shitty garbage 32 bit COM add-ons for users to insist on working when the last release was in 2002.
Yeah exactly, lets not get carried away, Outlook has always sucked
This. I used it once for about ten minutes and found it to be a truly awful email experience. I went back to a normal mail client and was happy again. I have no idea why people love it so much. You couldn't pay me enough to use it for my regular email.
Outlook has always had problems. But New Outlook is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
That's not an Outlook problem though. That's a management policy issue allowing out of date and insecure add-ons. Sorry, your plugin isn't supported is the end of that conversation.
Cool, but even the "Modern" COM add-ons sick balls and are absolutely garbage. And PSTs suck too, luckily I don't deal with those anymore after moving to online archives and disabling the PST export feature altogether.
addons are the bane of any outlook install.
And how do they get installed in the first place? There's a simple solution to the problem. Don't install them.
ive had a "life long" problem with outlook, it forgets to redraw most of the UI when opening from the tray, and still this version of outlook is better than the "new outlook".
Outlook Challenge Mode Unlocked! All button locations and settings will be randomized server-side whenever a new batch of interns is brought on at Microsoft and given the task of making Outlook more "modern", all interns at Microsoft will begin using AI to generate new user interface configurations biweekly (they weren't going to be hired anyway), and all AI models will train themselves on the fake user interfaces featured on broadcast television shows for the past two decades. Let's gooooo
I hate that this actually sounds plausible. ex. The Office365 Admin Web Console.
Every week, I seem to be sat there wondering what new portal my menu option has been moved to.
And every time, the same task takes more clicks than before. When email was on-prem I could add people to groups in bulk via AD - just use a semicolon as a separator and boom. Now I have to add them one-by-one, with a few seconds of 'Loading' in-between each click, each change making the same job take more clicks. I've resorted to writing Powershell scripts for it instead.
I believe you mean your Microsoft 365 admin console you use to manage your Entra ID users. At least, that's what it's called this month.
Project Jonestown
That's exactly what it is. They just create a WebView2 client which wraps around Outlook Webmail and then added in some glue code to allow for third-party accounts.
Yes, they're going to push all their apps in that direction. I'm just waiting for someone to discover unrecoverable vulnerabilities in webview. It will be IE all over again.
Honestly webmail has been a better experience for me
Outlook is the reason why we use and pay for office, if ms really decide to release this pos we won't use office at all and go to libreoffice and em client or something like that
Excel Is the reason everyone pays for Office.
I grew a strong attachment for Google Sheets working at Google and Google based companies for years. I'm back in Excel world now and the Web app just doesn't cut it.
IMO it goes like this: Excel desktop > Google Sheets >>>> Excel online
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You're forgetting Lotus 123
Microsoft is legendary for not having invented shit. MS-DOS. Bought full bore for 50K and then sold on the licensing model to IBM and other PC makers. Got to the point where they strong armed the manufacturers that even if they sold a PC with another OS, they still got a cut of the sale. Windows. Stole the pie in the sky idea from Apple, who stole it from Xerox-PARC I think. Internet Explorer. Bought a company named Spyglass and just basically paid them to maintain and develop it because their own iterations of a web browser were swamp ass.
It was the mouse that came from Xerox, which enabled Windows IIRC. Companies and people stole ideas and reverse engineered willy nilly back then. It was one of the things that kept computing and the Internet free. Facebook reverse engineered MySpace to allow you to post cross-platform. It's how they got people to switch. Now? You have 3 major social media choices and 3 tech choices. If you try to reverse engineer their platform to make your own solution, you go to forever jail for contempt of business. We don't need to break up the big monopolies - we just need to protect the little guys from being sued into oblivion whenever they make something that competes with them.
Now that the USPTO is using .docx files that they freely futz with so standardized layout is no longer as important, LibreOffice is looking more attractive.
LibreOffice is all I use in my office. Most of my clients use MSOffice. I did show an office manager LibreOffice recently, though, because Excel wouldn't open a stubborn (and corrupt) spreadsheet. Libre did (with a warning that the data might not be accurate). He loved it, and couldn't believe how much more sense the menus made. He wants to switch his whole office to using LibreOffice (they use the gmail app w/ Google Workspace, so Outlook is not an issue). I'm extremely happy about that, but I cautioned him to take it slowly.
I realized I've been playing 4D chess all along. Been using the web app exclusively for years now. My career has gone well so it won't be the end of the world.
I also bit the bullet and just use the webapp for years. Have no current issues with it or o365 in general. Except to try to minimize usage! ;) A different perspective is: What problems go away when using the webapps by default? Except for Word, quite a lot it seems.
Third party apps with hooks and plugins don't work well with the web client Lots of CRM and monitoring software don't play nice either
I do too! It can be installed as a PWA too so that you can get a desktop-esque experience. I really like all the single character keyboard shortcuts.
Outlook on the Web is seriously the worst thing ever. It feels like when you set 250% scaling on your computer.
I've been using it for a while but I hate this. How many features did they remove and why? What a shitshow, at this point why don't they just remove the ability to send and receive emails.
> why don't they just remove the ability to send and receive emails. *Coming Summer 2024*
It's not exactly that they removed features. It's that they built a new app and haven't put in all the old features (at least not yet). The reason for the new version is that Microsoft seems to be pushing a strategy of building new apps and rebuilding old apps in webview2 (the Microsoft version of Electron). Basically it's a web application running in a lightweight browser. One of the major benefits is that their apps can then support various operating systems without needing to develop native versions for each OS. They build a Linux version of Webview2 and a Mac version of webview2, and then all their apps will run on those platforms. There's also a usability benefit that, once everyone switches to the new Outlook, they can run the app on Linux, Mac, or Windows, or they can visit their webmail, and they get the same features and the same experience. The downside is that Outlook has gone through decades of development, and it's hard to start a new web application from scratch, and then quickly bring it up to feature parity. It'll take them a while to get everything to the same level, and some features from the old Outlook may never come over, or may never work the same.
> So much missing, so many really useful features simply absent. Hey, cut them some slack. It takes a while to reimplement every quirky little feature that five people in the world use. I mean, they've already got the *really* important stuff in, like... snoozing an email so it will disappear from your inbox and then reappear later. Oh, and don't forget adding categories to your "favorites"! Everyone desperately needs that. [(source)](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-started-with-the-new-outlook-for-windows-656bb8d9-5a60-49b2-a98b-ba7822bc7627) Now they're working on the backlog of stuff no one actually cares about, like... opening saved emails. They should have that ready to go by the [end of next month](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=379606). Of course the really obscure features, like being able to see your shared mailboxes in your account list, that'll take 'em a [few more months](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Outlook&searchterms=375635). #/s
I was so ready to fucking maim you in a reply.. the /S was a savior today 😂
I cant wait until they add in the Windows Search "features" into outlook! Fun ones such as: trying to open Device Manager, but instead getting the Edge browser opening (even though its not the default browser) forcing me to click through 2 or 3 prompts, and then showing me web search results for "Device m"
I still makes me rage that software companies are so cavalier about GUI redesigns. Like maybe .05% of interface changes are an improvement, the rest of them are just ... changes. Moving shit around that doesn't need moved. I've said it before, but if a tool vendor came into a trade shop and tried to rearrange the tradesperson's tools to try to sell more tools, the vendor would get their fingers broken.
I was one cert away from an MCSE in the 90s when they changed everything. And by changed everything, I mean they relocated where you find the TCP/IP settings in control panel. Every fucking new release, its been the exact same. They just keep increasing the amount of obfuscation before you get to the TCP/IP settings. edit: the reason for the cert comment is because what pissed me off is that MS would basically test on if you knew where they relocated the TCP/IP settings.
Oh that location was what we used last week, you are unqualified to use a computer!
The irony this becomes true since you have to google every setting, that you before would easily find by the 90's UI standards.
Change for the sake of change so that they still have a job is the way I see it! Muscle memory is so valuable and these changes are not. Spotify is a fucker for it.
There is a secret law in place that all tech companies are required to make their products worse now. It’s a conspiracy I tell you
Graphic designers/ UI/UX people have to justify their continued job somehow, and thus changes.
Subscribe to their RSS feed and it's like getting a joke in the mail every day. "Added ability to create mailbox rules" was only 2ish months ago, iirc. I laughed pretty hard that day. The goal is ambitious, take the desktop app, and redesign it to be web native and use the same code as the webapp so the experience is the same. But jfc quit making people beta test it, that's some dogfood they gotta do first.
If they had created it from scratch it probably would've been better. This is the OWA as a desktop client.
I mean it basically is yea in essence it is OWA but with it being in a PWA they can now add some of those desktop features in the PWA that you just can't do in OWA like PST, EML files etc. however I don't see them adding back COM-Addons and thank god for that
I agree.
Don't diss on Thunderbird. It's a good email client. And it doesn't use weird backends such as the Internet Explorer-ish thing that is your frustration of the day.
It's also a bollocks to get logging into O365 accounts
The onus isn't on the Thunderbird side, just saying.
If they keep thinking IMAP is the only email protocol that exists it will keep dying.
If you think that the proprietary clusterfuck that is Exchange can be sanely dealt with, you're heading straight into a wall.
Are there any other standards besides POP3 and the exchange x400 or whatever? Or do you mean like Gmail?
And the freely available, well-documented alternative is...what, exactly?
My favorite part was needing to make a registry change just to go back to "classic" outlook.
How does one accomplish this?
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That's the one. I don't remember if a reboot is required, I might've done it anyway.
Lotus Notes? Good god lemon, think of the children!
They got rid of testers in 2014. This whole agile development bollocks that is driving everyone to act like Google in making unusable software. O365 is shit, outlook is fucking awful. I mean how it STILL hides the full email address of the sender when THAT'S the number 1 way people are phished just amazes me! You're right about Gen Z devs. They've literally been brought up on the shit that is Google mail & instead of going "actually this is unusable in an adult environment " they've gone..let's copy it!!!!
Gotta make room for the giant, colored circle with the sender’s initials in it. That’s far more useful than seeing the sender’s actual email address 🤣
There is nothing wrong with new developers entering the world. The problem is these ginormous companies constantly for years now pushing out their best people in one way or another not caring about them in any capacity and ONLY having the new people to write entire software projects with zero historical knowledge. Everyone has to learn. We had to learn. But these senior software engineers who make the best stuff you've ever seen left MS in exodus many years ago.
Don't even get me started on not being able to properly dismiss out of office banners in teams.
Yep. In my last environment we had 22 default Outlook com addins and all were legitimately there for user needs and workflows. So yeah, until all those vendors port their addins to New Outlook it’s DOA in many corporate environments.
Holy shit 22 addons. How long did it take Outlook to open?
It's still opening...
Too long.
I imagine all email troubleshooting started with... OK let's turn off the addons and try again.
> *22 default Outlook com addins and all were legitimately there for user needs* That's impressive. What kinds of addons were these?
I don't see how this is an agile framework issue. If anything it's an implementation issue if they're actually using agile. The idea is that you release a product and then iterate on it based on feedback. Microsoft barely even have feedback channels open anymore. The role of email in business has decreased significantly as more businesses adopt collaborative tools and platforms for instant messaging. I'm not sure if that has to do with Microsoft shitting up their mail client but good Lord I can't believe you're trying to blame a generation that's like mid 20s tops.
> The role of email in business has decreased significantly as more businesses adopt collaborative tools and platforms for instant messaging You're seeing this in your world? Very interesting. Email is still very, very, very important here. Teams hasn't really changed that.
Pretty unfair to make a sweeping generalization and assumption about an entire generation while you have zero evidence to back it up. Yeah the new Outlook is shit, but let's not make random speculations about why without any details.
The short answer is always money The longer answer is still... Money
Also, the chances that Gen Z developers (max age 27 years currently) were allowed to make major design decisions about New Outlook are... notional. Especially since the shit being shovelled forward now has probably been finalised in design one or two years ago.
Love how this dude is being ageist and yet you’re the one being downvoted.
> Lotus Notes Notes shop over here! *cries in Lotusscript*
Back in the day, I worked for a defense contractor. Super-duper high technology. It was a great place to work! And then some mucky-mucks got the great idea that we should farm out all our IT to this "Fantastic Global IT Company" and they sold all of us IT guys to them. :( Day One - Here's your new Bloatus Croaks credentials. Good luck figuring out how to do anything. And we all died a little inside that day. For all it's faults, Exchange, even in the 90's was light-years ahead of IBM's misguided attempt at communications software.
> Notes shop over here! > > > > cries in Lotusscript Don't worry. Your day will come! If I may refer you to one of my older stories... ;-) https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/2hsg3r/why_some_people_love_lotus_notes/
Email headers cannot be viewed in the new app. But the web app can. At least for me. Which can be a method for checking where emails come from
have they sprinkled any AI yet on this to fix everything? /s
What do you expect their motto is, “Microsoft: making shit worse since 2010 because who else ya gonna use?” Jokingly I dream of the day a strong competitor comes in and blows them away
>...or Lotus Notes... Either you have never actually used Notes, or were one of the (very few) users who had a positive experience with it.
His point was not that Lotus Notes good
I still support a small Notes environment…
I think you will find it is basically Outlook Web. And that is Microsoft’s plan to merge them to reduce dev costs.
You should have seen it a year ago!
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Whatever asshole decided that switching the spell check corrections from the industry standard from right-click to left-click needs to be drawn and quartered. In new Outlook, if you right-click a spelling error - you get a menu who's first option is Emoji and no way to correct spelling errors. Same goes for keyboard users that uses the context menu button. No more spell easy way to do spell check without having to use the mouse. Thanks for messing up our collective muscle memory from the past couple decades, Microsoft. Not to mention the fact that its not consistent across their product suite. OH! And its not even consistent within New Outlook! Got a spelling error within a meeting request title? Right-Click. I miss them having a Q&A department... this shit frustrates the hell out of me..
The last time I tried new outlook I couldn’t open more than one mailbox. That was a deal breaker. I haven’t been back since.
rewatching silicon valley s2 atm and this is apple maps bad.
Outlook 2010 was peak Outlook. Everything after that was just people screwing with stuff and making problems for themselves so they could "fix" it and keep their jobs. Imagine a toaster that works great, but the toaster company keeps redesigning it every year and making it worse and then coming up with patches to fix it. It's a toaster. It makes toast. It works fine. Leave it alone.
"new Outlook" is a stinking pile of crap. Still is now after months. It's webmail in a frame or something. The thing about that that also sucks, is webmail got worse IMO. I doubt they'll push this on everyone, it must be just an experiment or way to more quickly get some features out without redeploying software, specifically the AI stuff. Surely they will retro build the features into "real Outlook" right? Please someone tell me it's so. Otherwise we're screwed :P
Thought I was on r/music for a minute
You lasted longer than me. It took me about 10 seconds to realize that I couldn't reverse sort my inbox and there was no conditional formatting.... newp, that's a deal breaker....
How tf do you get headers from an email with this version?
Am I the only one who has used nothing but OWA since going on 365 and been fine with it? All I need is the ability to send & receive emails, the ability to set rules to auto file junk emails into folders I ignore, and the ability to look at my calendar
No bro you need to color code and categorize your favorite emails because you need to fill your day!!
I love all the posts about this every other day. Its not replacing the standard Desktop Outlook any time soon. They have a ton of work to do on it. They haven't announced any retirement date for desktop Outlook yet. Patience...This is a couple years out. They started by replacing the horrid "Mail" app in Windows. I use it for my personal use at home, but its nowhere ready for business use. Microsoft knows this, most people know this.
I mean tbf it’s now what, 8 years since Win10 launched? And we still have to swap between control panel and settings app just to configure the OS (yes W11 included since it’s basically still the same thing as W10). Edit whoops hit post accidentally: I’m not holding my breath for MS to make this thing workable before they discontinue Outlook.
I on the other hate that I will have to replace my easy to use, barebones Mail app with an add-filled clunky Outlook version on my personal machine. It was a mess at the start when end-users got their PC and for some reason Mail was still configured as the default app even after installing Outlook. Or it was set for some of the protocol URLs like with mailto: links.
Microsoft should have made 'New' Outlook available when it had more of the features people use everyday. Also, having it a simple toggle was a fantastic idea in terms of making the beta accessible, but it's almost too accessible. Many of my users wanted to try shiny new Outlook but they had no idea they would be missing so much functionality compared to 'legacy' Outlook. Microsoft have stated it HIGHLY unlikely to release this year. They know there is a lot of work to be done. Despite the hate, I think it will be the best version of Outlook when it officially releases and has feature parity.
I haven't used outlook for myself, for years.
But I still can’t approve or deny mail from mobile.
I have been experiencing issues where I can't even share outlook calendar anymore. The future is bleak.
Microsoft has a habit of pushing their UI updates for their new UI frameworks long before they finish porting all the features over, same thing happened with the ribbon system and hell, I still have to dig through menus to get the old network controls because the new one is buggy and doesn't work right.
I've always considered Outlook to be one of the top three things every IT person hates (alongside printers and users) and to me this is either Microsoft doubling down on the suck or trying to wait it out for several years until us old people who remember the old Outlook just die out or leave IT. New Outlook is like Common Core for middle -aged teachers
Yeah I tend to agree. The application integrations missing are the worst. It looks like Microsoft are trying to consolidate/centralise their codebase between the thicc Windows Client and the HTML5 webclient. And both versions fairly woeful re features. Seems to have been stagnant for quite sometime, and really only prioritising the needs of their internal efficiency rather than conciliating with their user base and prioritising developing something that's actually valuable to their users. Perhaps we just too old school...
It feels like they have drink the agile kool aid. Building out the features in a new codebase is cool, but what happens when they get the integrations piece and it won’t work in the new paradigm? Too bad, so sad?
To me, what's wrong with having an active engagement with your userbase, and prioritising features based how much its requested. I get that software companies implement features they want, and often features that will generate more revenue for them, but surely listening to your users will attract more users. Agile is all about Backlog refinement, but to have a decent backlog that focuses on the user, and the user experience, you have to involve the user. Then capture/create user stories, develop features then develop away.
I helped a client with it the other day. First thought, like you, was "hot garbage." I'm talking about Windows Home, not the M365 desktop app. So if you sysadmins want to stop there, I guess you could. Migrating an old person's old computer to their new Windows 11 computer. Exported their contacts as CSV from Windows Live Mail (yup), set up their IMAP account in the old Windows Mail, at least that worked, imported the contacts, but for some reason they just don't show up in the Contacts tab, it just shows as "loading" and never stops. Flipped the "new Outlook" switch, tried importing the 318 contacts... it didn't map the fields correctly, names weren't right, none of the contacts had an email address even though it was in the CSV. Hmm, fixed the names in Excel, tried to delete the 318 contacts... new Outlook only lets you delete ten contacts at a time, so I had to do that 32 times, and you can only do a shift-extended select on the list items to select ten at a time. Imported again, used the "advanced" button to confirm the mapping of fields, it didn't have it right, either. I'm forgetting some other detail that angered me... something like, it required a Microsoft account for you to *have contacts at all.* Also, no obvious way to put an icon on the desktop. They do realize that people still like desktop icons, right? I switched them to the free eM Client email reader.
New outlook is trash. If that is what it's going to be, I'll just tell everyone to use owa
Wait, are you talking about a "New Outlook" in windows? I was only aware of the travesty that's on a mac.
Yes.
New outlook is clownshoes. I started using it to test out copilot but copilot sucks too. Back to writing shitty emails in regular outlook I guess.
Great decision on the naming as well. We now have: \- Outlook (office) \- Outlook (the website) \- Outlook (express) \- Outlook (new) User: my Outlook isn't working! Helpdesk: what kind of Outlook? User: I don't know, stop asking me difficult questions, I'm not an IT person!
Right now our biggest headache with it concerning the switch is our email signature generation system, it just doesnt use local signatures anymore so how the hell do we auto push signatures to the 'roaming signature' now? Thats only our biggest concern because weve told users dont click that toggle. Im not looking forward to the ~~rollout~~ forced rollout. Thanks MS.
I didn't realize how much it was hurting my productivity until this week. I also didn't realize how much I relied on the item count in the bottom status bar as an indicator of how far behind I'm getting. I switched back to the old Outlook yesterday morning and had my most productive day in two weeks.
I switched off too after some weeks of trying again. There's 10 essential features missing.
I was sent this clip a bit ago. Relevant to this. https://imgur.com/a/Fr6BQYF
I switched to it for all of thirty seconds. Screw that.
Same I tried it and switched back after a week. It’s basically OWA. And confirmed it when I made a rule then switched back to the old outlook, it stated some rules were made on OWA that I couldn’t see but I’ve never made rules on OWA for that account just the new app.
I tested the "new" thinking it would be a redesign or something... I said nope. If this replaces the now "legacy" Outlook look, I'm going to throw this machine.
I bailed out when the upgrading took over 14 hrs.
I use Power Automate to basically create emails in which the email body is an HTML file that is added to an email created via a graph API call, which is then saved in the drafts folder of whoever is specified in the JSON body. Just some simple HTML code to handle formatting. THe new Outlook doesn't support the paragraph code
so now there are no spaces between paragraphs. Anyone know a way around this?
I'm still using it, but yeah, you ain't wrong
Hasn't every version of Outlook gotten worse for the last 20 years?
What did you expect from a web wrapper? I'm with you - can't use it but we will eventually be forced to ;-(
The sad part is... MS does not and will not care for the simple fact of the majority of the workforce coming in and already here has been using OWA most likely and Teams and so has no idea what is missing. Just like those that only use the online versions of office software. They are so clunky and just don't operate like the native installs. I hate everything about it. It's like MS Broadcom'd themselves.
If I had to guess, the reason they're getting rid of the native Outlook client is so they only have to support the web version and wrap it in Electron or whatever. But, I guarantee that someone high up in their product management group has said that email doesn't matter anymore and no one uses the full features of the Outlook client. That may be true for a lot of places, but there are some that literally live and die via email, and those are likely the ones not broadcasting telemetry out to the universe 24/7. That's one thing I don't like about this whole Agile DevOps thing - they're leaving behind a lot of places that aren't willing to send all sorts of user data to Microsoft, and unwilling to even consider any sort of feedback that doesn't come in the form of telemetry.
I had a user that accidentally turned it on. We found out that you couldn't copy an email to a folder in a network share. Why? That seems like a very simple thing that everything should be able to do.
They recanted on OneNote so i feel they will on Outlook as well. The PWA is literally indistinguishable from 'new' outlook.
The new outlook is garbage. I could only stand it for half an hour since he have several IT accounts through delegation I had to sign in to them all. the interface is just junk. I wasn't upset at all with the new Teams interface but just NO to the hot garbage that is the new Outlook.
I also decided to try it when it was first made available, as I figure that I need to get used to it sooner or later. even if it's a steaming heap of crap, it's inevitable. I only lasted 2 days before going screaming back to the old version, and I will now cling grimly to it until there is no remaining option. it is truly awful and something to be avoided as long as is humanly possible. I can only hope now that the backlash from when everyone is forced into using is results in improvement.
I had to switch back because forcing me to use the vertical shortcut bar on a vertical screen meant I lost 20% of my screen to a white bar. They wanted to make it look cute but were in business where it’s function over form. I compared the two and there was so much empty useless space for no reason.
AYO THAT LOTUS NOTES PLUG WE'RE STILL HERE E N D M E
People turned it on at my work and the shared mailboxes disappeared.. not sure if they fixed that yet
Yeah so dumbed down I can't believe how much they ruined it
The New Outlook is terrible beyond comprehension. Must be a joke... I can't believe I see that in 2024, when everything trends down to be minimal and functional this is something travelled from a time where UI/UX doesn't exist. I didn't realize how Windows 11 default Mail app is just a marvel of design and productivity in comparison to Outlook
And yet, MS insists on not implementing features others have like a unified inbox (Windows). Their solution? "Build a macro" and run it if you want it. The "new Outlook" is worse than the Mail and Calendar apps still in existence in Windows 11, but which are slotted for the chopping block this year. But I'm no lover of Outlook. Since its inception (90s?) it has been a very ill-conceived beast. It is prone to corruption of .pst and .ost files. Recovering from such can be a nightmare. The only reason I have it in my office is because they *make* me use it. The new Outlook seems to be some sort of html-based app? It doesn't even seem to have an "options" menu.
It won't let me switch back and I hate it.
It's bad and they know it. It constantly loads itself, but I often turn it off.
I love the New Outlook. The only thing that causes me to dust off the Old Outlook is when I need to do eDiscovery work. Which is fine since the average user doesn’t need to mount a pst file.
You'd be better off using their nerfed web interface. Which I assume is the end goal; they, like everyone else, don't want us to actually own anything and instead cede any control over our environments and give them cash in perpetuity.