Microsoft 365/outlook.com E-Mail

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JGoodish

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JGoodish
I am a Microsoft365 Family subscriber in order to have Office on all of my home devices. With this subscription, I have a generous OneDrive quota and ad-free outlook.com email. We presently have an all-Apple environment and use Apple's iCloud email (IMAP-based), but have wondered about migrating to Microsoft's email/calendar/contacts platform. Apple's email seems fine, but the platform and clients are often slow to fetch and make changes across devices (could be Apple Mail rather than server), and of course, new message badges don't automatically sync across devices until the mail client is opened and the IMAP update happens.

Does anyone use the non-corporate outlook.com platform for email? One issue that I've heard is that the spam filter is very aggressive, and there is really no way to tune it (other than whitelisting) for personal accounts. It's Microsoft, which I don't especially trust, but I trust Google even less. With iCloud email, I occasionally have folks claim that they don't receive my emails, but it's rare and unclear whether it's on the iCloud end or the recipient's end. Microsoft's two-factor authentication seems decent, but their privacy policy is perhaps somewhat suspect. I'm probably most concerned about the reliability/functionality of the service.

Appreciate thoughts.
 
Couple thoughts.

Office online is “fine”. Not great, not bad. Commodity stuff.

You’re correct about spam filters but none have good controls. Not even Google. At the consumer level expect lost things and no logs to look at to see why.

They had a worldwide outage of authentication a few weeks ago. Locked everybody out, including paid customers. Not often but they aren’t as good as Google at uptime.

MSFT calendaring really only works 100%-ish properly with Outlook. For varying values of 100%. Meaning they have their own bugs and they’re different bugs between Windows and Mac versions of LookOut.

Web interfaces are taking over as the interface that always works, crosses platforms and browsers, always gets bug fixes first, and provides the least suckage on both Google and MSFT.

Apple is the odd man out on that and the mail client is fairly capable when used against the competitor’s services but calendar stuff beyond basics will exhibit both documented and undocumented breakage depending on use case.

Subtle crap too. Sync issues if special Unicode characters are used for example. Room reservations or other “resource” scheduling. Delegation of calendars to other people. Various levels of broken —you just have to use them all to see if your use case breaks something.

I’m general if it does, Outlook will behave better. Built in mail and calendar on Win10 may also work but that mail client is atrocious. Mac, it’s Outlook for best compatibility.

In other words, follow the same path paid corporate users would have to use, software-wise on Microsoft stuff — then when they regularly break things you’ll be in the same screaming mad customer group as corporations paying mega bucks for enterprise licensing of both desktop software and cloud services.

Path of least resistance when you’re in the cheap seats.
 
denverpilot said:
Couple thoughts.

Office online is “fine”. Not great, not bad. Commodity stuff.
Click to expand...

I pretty much have concluded that there is no “good” email. I agree that web-based interfaces seem to be taking over, but unfortunately that means that a network connection is required to access email.

Apple’s native clients work much better with Exchange than they have in the past, but the native Mail client for macOS keeps getting worse in general. Microsoft Outlook for Mac seems better, but not the atrocious “new” version they rolled out, which has even fewer features than the older client (which itself was missing parity with Windows.). On the other hand, I haven’t been impressed with Outlook for Windows, either. As central as email has become, you’d think we’d have better systems.

With respect to web interfaces, Outlook.com (or Gmail) probably wins over Apple iCloud for functionality. From the client perspective on the latest macOS and iOS, IMAP operations against iCloud mail servers are often excruciatingly slow or outright fail without notification. Not sure whether that is the fault of the clients or the servers.

I kept mail on iCloud for reasons of better privacy policy and cost, as I don’t know that I will subscribe to M365 forever. However, the performance issue and sporadic reports of folks missing emails I’ve sent are causing me to consider a move. Wherever I’d move, I’d also need family calendar and contacts support, which Outlook.com provides.
 
JGoodish said:
but unfortunately that means that a network connection is required to access email.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, could you please explain that? Unless you mean e-mail that you may have downloaded to a local device, I thought you had to be on a network to access e-mail, al least to send and receive it.

Thanks for bearing with someone who writes code to run lab equipment.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
I'm sorry, could you please explain that? Unless you mean e-mail that you may have downloaded to a local device, I thought you had to be on a network to access e-mail, al least to send and receive it.

Thanks for bearing with someone who writes code to run lab equipment.
Click to expand...

Traditional mail clients have a cache and an offline mode.
 
nobody likes Thunderbird?
 
Cap'n Jack said:
I'm sorry, could you please explain that? Unless you mean e-mail that you may have downloaded to a local device, I thought you had to be on a network to access e-mail, al least to send and receive it.
Click to expand...

Yes. I sometimes need to look at past emails when I may not have cellular service or WiFi. I occasionally write emails without a network connection, which I can do from a local client, and the email will be sent out when the client syncs with the server the next time a network connection is available.
 
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JGoodish said:
I pretty much have concluded that there is no “good” email. I agree that web-based interfaces seem to be taking over, but unfortunately that means that a network connection is required to access email.
Click to expand...

I have an office365 account and use both the outlook client on windows 10 and on Android. Both allow me to compose or read messages while offline. The only thing that doesn't work is of course the sync across devices regarding read status etc.
 
weilke said:
I have an office365 account and use both the outlook client on windows 10 and on Android. Both allow me to compose or read messages while offline. The only thing that doesn't work is of course the sync across devices regarding read status etc.
Click to expand...
I might be confusing it with something else, but my employer uses Office 365, and it seems to keep iOS, laptop, and the web view all seem to synchronize well. The reason I might be confused is there could be several products with the same name. As an example, Adobe has muddied their brand with the LightRoom products- there is LightRoom classic, LightRoom Creative Cloud, and LightRoom Creative Cloud classic, but they are all a bit different.
 
denverpilot said:
It’s fine but has gone downhill. The Mozilla foundation has big political issues anymore, they’re not focused on their software as their top priority much.
Click to expand...

Yep. I dropped them when their senior management took some clearly bigoted and illegal HR actions and were proud of it. Ditto Starbucks.

I wish I could free myself from Google/Alphabet Inc. as well as webmail, but the only alternative is to be my own provider. I might do that soon anyway...
 
For personal email, if you have your own domain there are plenty of other providers out there. (FastMail, ProtonMail) Although personally I still use Google. I gave up running my own mail years ago after I lost the spam battle.
 
I detest outlook (both the app and the online service). I've been running on a email service called TuffMail for over a decade now. It's IMAP-based (though it does have a couple of webmail clients available). I have it interfaced to my preferred computer email app (eMclient for both windows and mac) and the mail app on the iPhone. I've also been using my own domain so I can easily switch my service if I need to (just takes an MX record). It's just my name with .com on the end (no its not flyingron.com, but I do own that domain as well).
 
JGoodish said:
I am a Microsoft365 Family subscriber in order to have Office on all of my home devices. With this subscription, I have a generous OneDrive quota and ad-free outlook.com email. We presently have an all-Apple environment and use Apple's iCloud email (IMAP-based), but have wondered about migrating to Microsoft's email/calendar/contacts platform. Apple's email seems fine, but the platform and clients are often slow to fetch and make changes across devices (could be Apple Mail rather than server), and of course, new message badges don't automatically sync across devices until the mail client is opened and the IMAP update happens.

Does anyone use the non-corporate outlook.com platform for email? One issue that I've heard is that the spam filter is very aggressive, and there is really no way to tune it (other than whitelisting) for personal accounts. It's Microsoft, which I don't especially trust, but I trust Google even less. With iCloud email, I occasionally have folks claim that they don't receive my emails, but it's rare and unclear whether it's on the iCloud end or the recipient's end. Microsoft's two-factor authentication seems decent, but their privacy policy is perhaps somewhat suspect. I'm probably most concerned about the reliability/functionality of the service.

Appreciate thoughts.
Click to expand...

I switched from Gmail to Outlook about a year ago for exactly the reasons you describe. The amount of spam from Gmail made it almost unusable and I was unnerved by the fact that targeted ads on websites would change to reflect a personal email discussion about a certain item or topic. Both of these issues went away with Outlook, and I don't have any major complaints. The spam filter is aggressive, but I prefer that to the alternative.
 
I like Hotmail (outlook.com). I was actually one of the first five hundred people to sign up for Hotmail when it was new, and before it was purchased by Microsoft.

I have Yahoo and Gmail accounts as well. I can't stand Gmail. It confuses the hell out of me.
 
Sac Arrow said:
I like Hotmail (outlook.com). I was actually one of the first five hundred people to sign up for Hotmail when it was new, and before it was purchased by Microsoft.

I have Yahoo and Gmail accounts as well. I can't stand Gmail. It confuses the hell out of me.
Click to expand...
Once you figure out everything is just a tag, and there's no such thing as "folders" it makes more sense.

Then you hook it to a regular mail client and they simulate folders from tags and things get weird again. Lol

Oh and all "Archived" is, is an email with no tags. Not even the inbox tag.
 
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