Outlook for Windows (replacement for Mail, People, & Calendar Apps) Plays Better with Google

[fincoder]

I don't need to know that it's an inbox. I just need to know which email address I'm switching between.

You're switching between favourite mailboxes, not accounts as such. Outlook does the same.

I'm still really not happy with Thunderbird though. Why should I have to have all my emails downloaded onto my computer? Isn't the purpose of IMAP so that you don't have to deal with that garbage?

It's an option in the account settings (sync all messages regardless of age, or sync the most recent NN days). The problem is they default to all, whereas the Mail app defaults to the last 14 days I believe (and can be changed to all).

I just tested the latest Thunderbird with an outlook.com account and they still don't support Exchange natively. That would be OK for some if they helped the user connect to online contacts and calendar with standard protocols. How hard would it be to build-in settings for those outlook.com services? I can't be bothered looking up the server names etc, don't need to do it for Mail/People/Calendar or for emClient/Outlook.

So the account setup procedure is still quite poor in Thunderbird (haven't tried gmail though).

 

[Metanis]

General Release status for home users now.

Orgs Now Getting the New Outlook for Windows -- Redmond Channel Partner

The new Outlook for Windows 11 app is now at the 'general availability' release stage for personal users, but it's also 'enterprise ready.'

rcpmag.com

The new Outlook for Windows for organization admins

If you are an IT admin, an organization admin, or a Microsoft 365 commercial customer - This blog has information you might want to know about the new Outlook..

techcommunity.microsoft.com

I suspect @callthatgirl is going to have a VERY good year of billings ahead!

 

[britechguy]

I suspect @callthatgirl is going to have a VERY good year of billings ahead!

Agreed. I also think, though, that Microsoft is going to be forced to allow large entities to maintain the "Outlook Classic" UI for many, many years to come.

New Outlook just doesn't provide many of the tools that Outlook users are not only accustomed to, but do actually use heavily. Rules being one of the most important. "Quick Actions" aren't rules in any meaningful sense, as they must be applied on demand, not as mail arrives (or, in the case of the server-side protocols, actually before it arrives to your device).

 

[callthatgirl]

This new Outlook should only be released to home users, I guarantee 100% all my business clients will die if forced to use it.

 

[callthatgirl]

Just tested PRE with gmail and yep, the calendar synced perf. I will try to sell this to clients as a solution but they love everything else about Outlook that was 100% removed. We'll see.

 

[britechguy]

I guarantee 100% all my business clients will die if forced to use it.

That's why I think the "classic" UI option is here to stay, and for a very long time, even if it's as an option. If it were to be stripped away entirely, I can't see anything other than a massive and very ugly revolt happening if regarding nothing else but rules, but it would be more than that.

The Outlook PRE for desktop is a complete tinker toy compared to Outlook as all of us who've worked with it for decades, whether as end users or technicians, know it. That's just not going to fly with the massively huge embedded base of users.

 

[John Kennedy]

I don't know if any of you have noticed, but the "New Outlook" looks and works a heck of a lot like Outlook Web Access. Nearly all the look and feel is the same, the lack of options is the same, and the main point is that it doesn't really store much of anything locally.

Case in point: I moved a customer from a GoDaddy Microsoft 365 tenant to their own MS365 tenant. I didn't use a transition tool because it was only four accounts and none were very large, so why bother? I exported their mailboxes to PST, created a new profile to the new tenant, and then imported the PST file and let Outlook do the importing for me. Short and sweet except that one user couldn't see anything in several of her folders nested underneath the inbox. I worked with support for weeks on this. In New Outlook and Outlook Web Access, everything was there. Only regular Outlook had the problem (proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's a completely separate program, even when it's the Preview). Eventually, using a MAPI tool we found a setting in each of those folders that was wrong, switched it back to default, and they started syncing again.

"New Outlook" is a pretty window "app" for what is primarily a cloud mailbox with NO data being stored locally. This means no PST files, requiring email to go to a Microsoft server (they're just setting up a sync with their cloud servers and hosting it from there rather than direct with Google or anyone else), which also means no local-only rules (no PST file to operate on) which are how you'd have rules for non-Microsoft accounts with normal Outlook.

The above is purely conjecture based on what I've seen and would logically make sense. So is this: Microsoft is trying to move everything to a service for email so you no longer need to worry about the data stored on your local computer (see OneDrive "backup") so switching between computers is easy and so they can force you to buy online space like Apple does for iCloud.

 

[britechguy]

looks and works a heck of a lot like Outlook Web Access.

And that's by intent. At one time this all used to be "code named" as "One Outlook."

I also get why consistency in the UI is, indeed, a good thing. But the "top end" should be the direct equivalent of the current Outlook desktop app with features being stripped out for the free version(s). Not unlike Windows Home versus Pro - the underlying code is 100% the same, it's the activated feature set that differs.

And with regard to rules, for the most part Outlook has been passing them to the respective email servers for actual execution wherever that's possible. Playing sounds for specific messages has to be local, but most filtering is of the, "if criteria X & Y are met, shove message into folder Z," variety. Where these things happen is not of particular concern, or at least not to me, but having a UI in the Outlook client, when were talking the paid desktop client, for creation and management of rules is critical.

 

[John Kennedy]

And with regard to rules, for the most part Outlook has been passing them to the respective email servers for actual execution wherever that's possible. Playing sounds for specific messages has to be local, but most filtering is of the, "if criteria X & Y are met, shove message into folder Z," variety. Where these things happen is not of particular concern, or at least not to me, but having a UI in the Outlook client, when were talking the paid desktop client, for creation and management of rules is critical.

Have you checked regular Outlook and any rules ever set up for an IMAP account? Those were always local only. Outlook has never sent those rules elsewhere. They work with regular Outlook only while it's open. If you set up the rule for a gmail account, for instance, inside Outlook, closed Outlook, and then checked whether the rule still worked by checking on gmail, it wouldn't.

I definitely get it, I agree with where the base level of functionality should be, but this is Microsoft. They'll try hard, force it, and then back off when too many big businesses complain. Might or might not make you pay extra for it too.

 

[britechguy]

Have you checked regular Outlook and any rules ever set up for an IMAP account? Those were always local only.

I honestly thought that Outlook had begun (for Gmail, anyway) passing rules through to Google's filter mechanism. But, having just tried creating a garbage rule for a Gmail account, Outlook gave a warning dialog that it was client side only and that it would only be applied when Outlook was running.

It amazes me that Outlook, of all email clients, has refused, for decades now, to "play well with others" on a consistent basis. Its even worse when Outlook has become the de facto standard email client, much like the Office Suite programs (standalone or M365) long ago became the de facto standards for their respective functions.

 

[John Kennedy]

It amazes me that Outlook, of all email clients, has refused, for decades now, to "play well with others" on a consistent basis. Its even worse when Outlook has become the de facto standard email client, much like the Office Suite programs (standalone or M365) long ago became the de facto standards for their respective functions.

But you can understand why it hasn't, I'm sure. Google would have to open all its APIs to Microsoft, Google may or may not require them to pay for it, Google doesn't want people using Outlook (they took away Outlook sync for a while), Microsoft doesn't want people using gmail/Google Workspaces (direct competitor), and many Google users don't want to use Microsoft Outlook anyway.

IMAP doesn't have a built-in way to do rules and many of the other things we take for granted with MS Exchange. Outlook never has been a good IMAP client, though, not even doing IMAP correctly or well. There's no excuse for that, but every excuse for not being more compatible with additional features outside IMAP.

 

[britechguy]

The fact is that Microsoft and Google both have acted like petulant children when it comes to services the other provides that are NEVER going away, but that those in each company's respective ecosystems need to use, and seamlessly, from the other company's.

As has been noted here, suddenly, after years of both free and paid versions of Microsoft email clients not being willing to play well with Google when it came to anything except IMAP email, suddenly we have perfect, seamless integration of both Contacts and Calendar, which one side, the other, or possibly both (I really don't care about these pissing matches, they need to stop) fought tooth and nail to prevent that from happening, and third parties filled the void with sync clients for those two things.

In 2023, Outlook had ought to be able to connect to ANY protocol that allows synchronization of mail, contacts, and calendar (at a minimum) for any account that supports it. And it now appears it may be actually doing so. But it's still way too late for that to seem impressive. They had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to get there.

And anyone who wants to make the assertion that Outlook is only meant to work with Exchange need not bother. It has been essential that it work with other protocols for decades now, and it did, but restricted that only to email rather than "all the common things that sync that come with it."