Proton Mail says that the new Outlook app for Windows is Microsoft's new data collection service

Yeah no shit, and you do think I have a single goddamn bit of influence over my corporation's choice of email client??

Hey Proton how about you quit privacy-washing and actually prioritize and release feature parity products for Linux so your customers aren't being herded onto windows' data harvesting platform just so they can use your supposedly privacy forward products

What part of Windows (or Microsoft software in general) is not a data collection service?

No shit. There's a reason they are killing the nice and simple Windows Mail app; it allows you to sync with your email without Microsoft servers between.

Also, the biggest issue for me is the UX. I use outlook for my work email and like to separate my work and personal life, so soon I just won't have an app for my personal email on my PC.

If anyone knows of a similar windows mail app with good touch support and without such a traditional mouse designed UI, please share it.

Outlook honestly was not that bad for a while, but of course Microsoft does what Microsoft does. I've been using Thunderbird for about a year now and it is very full featured coming directly from outlook.

I got a popup saying "wanna try the new Outlook app"? So I did and the fucking thing immediately inserted ads that resembled email into my inbox. If this is the future I'll install Thunderbird.

I tried the new outlook for about 30 seconds. They injected ads into my mail.

Instantly uninstalled it.

For a few years, I had hope that Microsoft would become a respectable, user-oriented, even FOSS-friendly company, but they finally seem to have settled on AI enshitification as their main business model.

TBH when I got this exact pop up on my last windows laptop (dell xps13) I actually panicked and installed PopOS on it.

I didn't feel like distro hopping, I just needed it to work. I guess that shows how I feel about PopOS at the moment.

I mean... Yeah.

As someone with an iCloud account, every time I try to use Outlook it randomly deletes emails from my iCloud account. I’ve posted this multiple times on Microsoft support site with others confirming and since it’s been more than year with no acknowledgment or fix I am convinced it’s a feature not a bug. YMMV.

"I heard you like data collection so we put data collecting email app in your data collecting OS so we can collect data about our data collection"

It’s basically gmail. It’s a web/email server that you give your creds over to . It has an offline mode that I guess makes it an app.

Yeah they read your shit.

Uninstall that shit.

Edit: if you HAVE to use Outlook (because of work, etc), use the web version of it exclusively.

Yeah, that update was the final push that moved me to Linux on my primary computer. I’ve used Linux for about 20 years on everything that wasn’t my gaming PC and between the advancements made by Valve and the increasing invasive nature of Windows put an end to my relationship with Microsoft.

As if the old outlook app wasn’t as …. Oh Shit! This is more egregious

I am aware this comes from a competitor and they want to go all out. However, what is unclear to me, does this also happen to paying users?

For my small business I use Office 365 Business Essentials, whatever it's called now, the cheapest one. Been using it for many years and for the price/features, it's pretty unbeatable. I use the new Outlook on my workstation since a few months, it's pretty slow and not feature complete but was ok. I'm in the EU and haven't been prompted with that window where it talks about advertisers. Will check Monday if I see a list of advertisers but I think for paid users it's not the same.

For personal mail, I use Thunderbird, I even donated to them. I like it but would have been great if it had a view like Outlook. At the moment it has table view and cards view. Wish the cards view would more customizable.

This is why I don't get excited when I hear some software that I already use and works fine gets an update. More often than not the update makes the software worse.

It's almost as if Microsoft doesn't do that already!

On that topic, is there an alternative for a mail client + calendar for Win 11 that doesn’t look and feel like a Windows 95 exe named Thunderbird?

I'm surprised that the developer of a privacy-focused product would accuse its competitor of not being good for privacy.

Unlike proton mail , microsoft offers basic IMAP POP functionality of its desktop app for free, Maybe proton should offer the same "essential" email functionality for free before criticizing Microsoft. there are many ways to monetize a service without rendering the free version legless.

Email is outdated. I hate that it's required for anything, no one uses it for anything other than a high speed fax machine for boring business communique

PROTON WORKS WITH THE FEDS PROTON WORKS WITH THE FEDS PROTON WORKS WITH THE FEDS PROTON WORKS WITH THE FEDS ProtonMail Gives Up Logs on User, Then Scrubs Website of No IP Logging Claims it gave out thousands of ip adresses over the years

Of course it is, it doesn't support pop3, only IMAP through their server

I liked Windows Mail for its simplicity but between the ads and the tracking for Outlook I guess I'm moving to something else. Now I understand why my mail accounts give Oauth or temporary passwords to external clients, because otherwise M$ would have them.

Same as it's always been

The Magic 8-Ball was right all along.

Is there a solid alternative that isn't as prohibitively expensive as Proton? It's like, stupid expensive, even for basic email service with very small storage

Like if proton was a VPS kind of thingy, even like some form of managed mail service through a docker container or something, where the user had control? That would be nice. But even then, who's to say they aren't monitoring the mail communication from the other end of that? You can't really trust any of these mail providers, because they simply have too much control over the days.