The basic Mail app in Windows 10 is still the baseline I compare every other email client to, and I’ve yet to find anything I like as much. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, it only ever ran under Windows, and for stupid reasons, it was deprecated and now if you try to launch it, it exits and launches Outlook (New), which is a horrible email client.
Outlook (new) is not even a “mail client” at all. It’s an Edge “webview” web app. Adding an account to this “app” actually allows outlook.com the website to sync your entire mailbox, read its contents, and “share” all of that data with their (last checked, could have changed since) 798 “data partners”.
Install Thunderbird.
Before someone says “it’s not pretty enough, I don’t like it”, if the price for privacy is a shiny theme, I’ve got nothing dumb enough to say to you. You’re beyond helping and you’re not worth my time.
Edit ^ that last bit wasn’t about you, person I responded to, just realized it sounded like it was.
Thunderbird is basically an Outlook-from-fifteen-years-ago clone, and I’ve always disliked Outlook, even before the recent push to make it even worse. Everything I disliked about old Outlook is exactly the same in Thunderbird, except the licence.
I don’t want much from a mail client, just:
basic stuff works
I can see an unread email count for each of my accounts at the same time, and also have the list of messages for the account I’m looking at and a reading/writing pane at the same time, too.
Thunderbird and Outlook will only show the unread count once you’ve expanded the list of directories in an account, so once you’ve got more than two accounts with a reasonable number of folders, any further accounts end up pushed off the bottom of the screen. This isn’t something that a theme for Thunderbird can change. It’d be a small change to include a total unread count next to the list item for each account when it wasn’t expanded and a total unread count next to the combined inbox button, but I’m not maintaining a fork of a mail client myself when it’d still be too Outlook-like to avoid being annoying.
In the end, I settled on Mailspring, but it doesn’t score brilliantly on the basic stuff works bullet point.
My 86 year old father-in-law has had the roughest time with the new outlook. It keeps losing his settings. I kept him on the (old) outlook as long as possible.
I tried Thunderbird for him, but some parts of the UI don’t respect extremely large fonts. Sigh.
My current solution is just straight up web mail to his provider which has other problems, but I have sorta-kinda mitigated them by installing a separate browser that is set to open that website. This has some other small problems, but it will have to do for now.
Though… “Teams classic” was an electron app, and I’m not sure that’s better.
Outlook “classic”, as far as I’m concerned, is the last actual email client program that Microsoft will make. From here on out, it’s all webapps.
Honestly, so much of their stuff runs in a web browser that you might as well just just google apps… It also negates any requirement to run their bloated shitware OS.
The basic Mail app in Windows 10 is still the baseline I compare every other email client to, and I’ve yet to find anything I like as much. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, it only ever ran under Windows, and for stupid reasons, it was deprecated and now if you try to launch it, it exits and launches Outlook (New), which is a horrible email client.
Outlook (new) is not even a “mail client” at all. It’s an Edge “webview” web app. Adding an account to this “app” actually allows outlook.com the website to sync your entire mailbox, read its contents, and “share” all of that data with their (last checked, could have changed since) 798 “data partners”.
Install Thunderbird.
Before someone says “it’s not pretty enough, I don’t like it”, if the price for privacy is a shiny theme, I’ve got nothing dumb enough to say to you. You’re beyond helping and you’re not worth my time.
Edit ^ that last bit wasn’t about you, person I responded to, just realized it sounded like it was.
Thunderbird is basically an Outlook-from-fifteen-years-ago clone, and I’ve always disliked Outlook, even before the recent push to make it even worse. Everything I disliked about old Outlook is exactly the same in Thunderbird, except the licence.
I don’t want much from a mail client, just:
Thunderbird and Outlook will only show the unread count once you’ve expanded the list of directories in an account, so once you’ve got more than two accounts with a reasonable number of folders, any further accounts end up pushed off the bottom of the screen. This isn’t something that a theme for Thunderbird can change. It’d be a small change to include a total unread count next to the list item for each account when it wasn’t expanded and a total unread count next to the combined inbox button, but I’m not maintaining a fork of a mail client myself when it’d still be too Outlook-like to avoid being annoying.
In the end, I settled on Mailspring, but it doesn’t score brilliantly on the basic stuff works bullet point.
My 86 year old father-in-law has had the roughest time with the new outlook. It keeps losing his settings. I kept him on the (old) outlook as long as possible.
I tried Thunderbird for him, but some parts of the UI don’t respect extremely large fonts. Sigh.
My current solution is just straight up web mail to his provider which has other problems, but I have sorta-kinda mitigated them by installing a separate browser that is set to open that website. This has some other small problems, but it will have to do for now.
I honestly wish Apple made a 20” iPad.
But Thunderbird is also technically a web app? It’s UI is literally made in (X)HTML/CSS/JS.
The message viewing component is, of course. Emails are html. The application itself is not a web app.
I have literally said that it is, and provided proof.
And it stores the data where
locally
I mean, the same can be said for “new” teams.
Though… “Teams classic” was an electron app, and I’m not sure that’s better.
Outlook “classic”, as far as I’m concerned, is the last actual email client program that Microsoft will make. From here on out, it’s all webapps.
Honestly, so much of their stuff runs in a web browser that you might as well just just google apps… It also negates any requirement to run their bloated shitware OS.