Microsoft Will Stop Supporting Windows Live Mail 2012 (office.com) 105
An anonymous reader writes: "Windows Live Mail 2012 users are on notice: Switch to a modern email client or lose access to any Microsoft email accounts they have," reports InfoWorld. In a Thursday blog post, Microsoft informed users of their Windows Live Mail software that "the time has come for you to upgrade to a new email application." Outlook.com is moving to a new Office 365 infrastructure which uses protocols not supported by Windows Live Mail, meaning its users "will not be able to send or receive Outlook.com email from Windows Live Mail 2012 after your account is upgraded." InfoWorld points out this affects users with email addresses ending with @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com, or @msn.com.
The Outlook team's corporate vice president posted on the Office.com blog that "We recognize that changes like this can be difficult and apologize for any inconvenience this causes you..." adding that "we are confident that you will love the benefits and performance of the new Outlook.com," and recommending users switch to the Mail app on Windows. The Inquirer reports that Microsoft also emailed the software's users, suggesting that "If you are using Windows 7, you can upgrade to a newer version of Windows to enjoy the Mail app and the other benefits."
The Outlook team's corporate vice president posted on the Office.com blog that "We recognize that changes like this can be difficult and apologize for any inconvenience this causes you..." adding that "we are confident that you will love the benefits and performance of the new Outlook.com," and recommending users switch to the Mail app on Windows. The Inquirer reports that Microsoft also emailed the software's users, suggesting that "If you are using Windows 7, you can upgrade to a newer version of Windows to enjoy the Mail app and the other benefits."
Re:They are phasing out Windows Live Mail 2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolve or die!
Or just just use services and mail clients based on established, independent standards, and spend your time on more important things than Microsoft's upgrade treadmill.
Register yourself a domain name of your own so you can control which service(s) will receive your mail in the future while you're at it.
and spend hours setuping DNS, MX, SPF, DKMI (Score:3)
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Perhaps, but there are about a million options on the scale between "depending on proprietary protocols and software that Microsoft can discontinue supporting at any time" and "setting up your own mail server". For example, there are numerous services that will host mail for you on their established mail systems, accessible with whatever client software you want over standard protocols like POP3 and IMAP and/or via webmail, and allowing you to use your own domain so you have complete portability and no lock
Re: or just use gmail with your domain name (Score:2)
Registering a domain name gives you options - but you don't have to run your own server. I use my own domain for mail, but at the moment I'm just using gmail to handle the mail. But I can switch anytime...
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Yeah because I paid a fee for my domain and then clicked a checkbox and my host did everything for me. Not hours. Not minutes. Probably about 10 seconds, maybe 45 seconds if I read what the button actually did.
There's a lot of options between "outsource everything to MS", and "build your own server from the ground up and self micromanage".
Standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
... Outlook.com is moving to a new Office 365 infrastructure which uses protocols not supported by Windows Live Mail,
Soooo.... which one doesn't support the standard email protocols that the rest of the world seems to use, the new Office 365 infrastructrue or Windows Live Mail?
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Yes.
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IMAP works with @hotmail and @outlook addresses. I prefer their spam filtering to GMail's so I use them for my "public" address (see next to my name here) and my email client is Thunderbird at the moment.
For domain email hosting, I've actually had good luck with Yandex. Yeah, I know that Putin is reading my email but at least they're probably not using it to sell it to people or to try to market stuff to me. There's also the side benefit that the NSA might not actually have a tap inside the Yandex servers.
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Um, both maybe? Dunno anyone who uses them so I couldn't say.
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Both support IMAP. So the only people affect are people using microsoft proprietary software which uses microsoft proprietary protocols which microsoft is dropping.
Maybe anyone this affects will think about using standards from here on out . . . yea, thats not going to happen :(
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There you go again (Score:4, Insightful)
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The mail program was from 2012. That means it's ancient, decrepit, designed in a less enlightened time by people who may be over 30 now. They need a *modern* mail program! And then upgrade that clunker every year.
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Yeah. There's no way that email could have been a settled matter in 2012. Clearly the innovation over the last four years would render a 2012 email client worthless.
And these people need to get a clue and upgrade their Windows, too.
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Yeah. There's no way that email could have been a settled matter in 2012.
You joke but my email is still a cesspool of black-holed routing, spam, and a mush of various functions supported incompletely by various clients and servers.
Email still has a LONG way to go for perfection.
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Do you mean their not supporting legacy systems and code? Yet when Microsoft devs were writing bug fixes within their OS code to account for legacy software, they were chastised. You cannot have it both ways - you either support them supporting legacy code (and all the headache that comes with it) or you support them requiring updates. Both have significant security/cost implications.
It's not both ways, it's one way:
Did Microsoft do it?
Then it's bad.
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At least learn to spell before posting racist crap.
That's fine (Score:3, Insightful)
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Outlook 2016 IMAP support is shit too. (Score:1)
- Errors about message having changed if marked read before deleting, so have to switch out of folder and back in.
- Delete doesn't properly mark as deleted, and if you set effect of deleting to move to Trash folder, half the time deleting from there does nothing.
I realise that most Microsoft development work is outsourced now, which means it's not actually written by people with a clue but rather thrown together and tested by listening to the biggest corporate clients and vaguely noticing the most important
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There's a few good cloud based calendar apps out there! You should check them out.
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If you'd actually read your own link before posting it...
How convenient that you ignored puto's first link that does show instructions for Outlook 2016. But to be more explicit, look at the email clients [centurylink.com] page. The clients listed with an asterisk next to the name are not supported by their tech support. Outlook 2016 is listed and it doesn't have an asterisk next to it. Therefore, it is a supported client.
There's no need for you to be a dick.
There is no need to be abusive just because what you claim is not matched by the written evidence on their website.
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How do you know Outlook 2016 was supported when GP called?
I don't know that, but I do know that it was supported at the time that the coward said that it was not.
And since when is calling someone out for being a dick "abusive" -- especially when that person is, in fact, being a dick?
How is it being a dick to provide evidence that they do actually support Outlook 2016? If that is being a dick, then so is providing a link to the Wayback machine to a time six months before the tech support call was made. Or perhaps it is being a dick to use a phrase that you would not personally use, which is simply saying that being literate and educated is "being a dick".
Re: Outlook 2016 IMAP support is shit too. (Score:2)
There were some bugs in rtm version of Office 2016. Users who had a working IMAP account in Outlook 2013 and upgraded would not be able to sync mail.
I think there was a relatively easy command-line fix, and I guess it should have been fixed with an update. Will try and find the details later.
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Despite Windows having been a "Unicode OS" since the NT days the commandline find and findstr tools still don't support UTF8 and UCS2 encoded files.
This is due to backwards compatibility. PowerShell and select-string supports Unicode fine, but it is the console window itself that is the limiting factor. If you run the PowerShell ISE then it displays the Unicode correctly, but under the console (prior to Windows 10) it just shows question marks. They have reimplemented the console in Windows 10 [windows.com] and PowerShell now displays the Unicode characters correctly.
The command prompt and findstr still don't work, but I suspect that this is considered to be legacy
Re: Did they ever really support it... (Score:4, Insightful)
They used to, at least much better than this. That's the saddest thing about the Microsoft strategy in recent years: not only are they not delivering the kinds of benefits they should be to justify the lock-in they're asking their customers to accept, they're actually going backwards in several important ways that those customers will notice. They're so busy trying to beat Google and Apple at their own game (and failing) that they've forgotten how to be Microsoft.
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Can't help but compare the Windows 10 situation where they're pushing many changes that many people don't like to the Xbox One release where they had to back down on many of their plans because people where threatening to go en masse to the PS4.
Conclusion: Competition good, monopoly bad
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What? That gobbledygook made no sense at all. They forgot how to be microsoft? Man, don't drink and post.
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Insulting me won't make your argument any more convincing.
Microsoft have had the dominant desktop OS for decades. They also have a significant presence in the server and back office space. With their long term support and ubiquitous presence, they were the adult player in an industry full of impetuous children, the business that business could count on.
And now they've thrown away that reputation in barely more than months, because cloud and subscriptions and devices and stuff.
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There was no argument, just you spouting nonsense. Your follow up was only slightly more lucid. I get the picture though. The only thing you can count on with Microsoft is spending lots of money. I don't know how many times their upgrades broke everything here. I remember the Vista rollout, half the computers were down at any one time for months. Really it was never right until windows 7 came out. You know you're the shit when you can get people to pay you to test your alpha software for you then pay
Useless bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
Another example of Microsoft moving relentlessly towards their wet dream of a walled garden.
This is useless bullshit- there is NO need to move to a mail app on Windows just to send and receive mail.
This is one of the most basic functions of the internet, and there are loads of full-featured webmail clients that work just fine, but that's not restrictive enough for Microsoft- they're going to insist that all your mail gets funneled through them so they can exercise even more control.
Sorry Microsoft, I won't
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Hmmmm, perhaps I read it wrong, but it seemed to me to that they were discontinuing one service and transitioning (read: forcing) people to their app-based service. (??)
"Switch to a modern email client or lose access to any Microsoft email accounts they have," reports InfoWorld.
and
In a Thursday blog post, Microsoft informed users of their Windows Live Mail software that "the time has come for you to upgrade to a new email application."
and
and recommending users switch to the Mail app on Windows
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Re:Useless bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Kind of but not really. The problem is they tried to lock people in with the Windows Live Mail app and if you are using the microsofts servers via windows live mail it forces a proprietary connection method. So the issue isn't with the server, they support all the normal basic suite of email sending and receiving methods. The problem is they tried to build a walled garden with their software 5 years ago and now don't want to support their own crap.
Of course they could release an update for windows live mail which removed the "force https stream / don't allow imap for microsoft domains" and the software would work with their server upgrades.
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>Of course they could release an update for windows live mail which removed the "force https stream / don't allow imap for microsoft domains"..
Did they really block you from just entering the account as a regular IMAP server with the normal info you'd use on another client?
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I believe that if you entered a hotmail / outlook domain name it would kick you out of the imap process and into their domain specific method. Its been a while since I touched that software though.
How well does webmail work offline? (Score:2)
there are loads of full-featured webmail clients that work just fine
To me, "just fine" includes the use case of going online to send mail, going offline to read it and compose replies, and going back online to send the replies. That used to be common when dial-up was pay-per-minute. It remains common nowadays on laptops to avoid having to subscribe to cellular Internet to read mail while riding the bus. In theory, webmail could work offline using IndexedDB and Service Workers, but in practice, I doubt that this works across all major browsers and all major webmail providers
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To me, "just fine" includes the use case of going online to send mail, going offline to read it and compose replies, and going back online to send the replies.
I sometimes travel between areas where I don't have connectivity. When that happens I just open a text editor and compose my reply, go back online and paste it into the reply window.
Also, unless things have changed, Thunderbird allows toggling online/offline mode.
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A native mail user agent is supposed to communicate with the mail server using SMTP AUTH for outgoing mail and IMAP for incoming mail. But historically, webmail providers have declined to deploy these protocols
unless things have changed, Thunderbird allows toggling online/offline mode.
That's what I was referring to, so long as your mail provider supports Thunderbird. Many don't, instead expecting users to read mail in a browser window while connected so that the provider can show ads.
Thunderbird (Score:1)
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Too bad Firefox/MOzilla is trying to shed itself of thunderbird too. I hope it finds a good home, it's been my go to mail client for years.
I did try evolution with Office 365 EWS and that worked well.
And I thought Microsoft had it all figured out (Score:3)
Surely, I thought, Microsoft had come up with the best way possible to terminate a service - initially give it the name "Windows Live Service X" then on termination change the name to indicate status.
But here we find Windows Live Mail 2012 will NOT be renamed to Windows Dead Mail 2012, instead it will BE Dead while named Live. How does that make any sense?
Well as the old saying goes, naming is one of the hardest problems in CS...
What is Windows Live Mail? (Score:3)
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Re:What is Windows Live Mail? (Score:5, Informative)
Modern crypto (Score:2)
So? whats a good replacement? (Score:2)