[plmpsu]

I wish I could use Thunderbird at work now that it has Exchange support . Unfortunately we're mandated to use Microsoft Outlook. Outlook feels like it has completely been forgotten by Microsoft. I don't recall the last time they updated anything meaningful in the product (at least on macOS), it's quite a mess of a product. Wishing Thunderbird all the best it's the competition we need.

[teekert]

You know what is nice? If you have clients that get automatically switched to "the new Outlook" and loose all imap connections (and they don't work anymore, period).

Took me so long to learn that the fix was to switch back to the old Outlook.

[josephg]

IMAP works in outlook. Its just horrible to set up and half broken. Click "Add account". Then type in your email address, click "Choose provider", select IMAP, then click "Sync directly with IMAP" (dark pattern hidden button). If you don't click that last button, outlook uploads your IMAP email credentials to their own MS Cloud instance, and that proxies all your emails via microsoft's cloud servers. Do they read your email messages for advertising? Nobody knows!

In my testing, the local IMAP client implementation quite frequently launches a DoS attack against your IMAP server. It'll send the same query requesting new mail messages in a tight loop, limited by the round-trip latency. But luckily, almost nobody uses IMAP via outlook because its so difficult to set up.

[Avamander]

> If you don't click that last button, outlook uploads your IMAP email credentials to their own MS Cloud instance, and that proxies all your emails via microsoft's cloud servers. Do they read your email messages for advertising? Nobody knows!

I've seen cases where people have it set up like that and it's so awfully slow. Minutes to display a single new message. That cloud brings absolutely zero user-benefit.

[josephg]

There's also two different applications which are both "Outlook for Mac".

If you go into the "Outlook" menu in the app, there's a "Legacy Outlook" button, which relaunches outlook using a completely different binary. The two outlook implementations have different bugs and all sorts of different behaviour.

Outlook For Mac is free but "legacy outlook" requires a MS365 subscription for some reason.

Outlook is also not to be confused with Microsoft's "Web Outlook" client, available at outlook.live.com. It all seems totally insane.

[cutler]

< It all seems totally insane.

This is Microsoft we're talking about, right?

[cosmic_cheese]

The online university I'm attending has something similar set up where third party Exchange client support is disabled, making official Outlook client usage non-optional.

It's very frustrating and I can't think of a valid reason to configure things this way.