The confusion over Microsoft’s plans to retire the current Mail and Calendar apps for Windows with the new Outlook for Windows app continues. Last week, Microsoft sent a message to Microsoft 365 admins stating the Mail and Calendar apps would be replaced by the new Outlook starting in September 2024. However, an apparent backlash against that timeframe caused Microsoft to send out a follow-up message stating it was now “reevaluating the timeline”.
Now, a new post on the Microsoft 365 message center, as shown by Windows enthusiast Tero Alhonen on Twitter, states that Microsoft won’t replace the apps with Outlook until sometime “by the end of next year.” This newly vague timeline shows Microsoft still doesn’t have a firm date yet, and may not have one for some time.
So Microsoft is – confusion aside – going to replace the native Windows e-mail and calendar applications with a website.
Not even Microsoft wants to write native Windows Applications. Makes you wonder just how much life Windows has left.
The mail app in win11 is just like win11. It works, but is confused. Some settings like “Signature” and “Default font” operate on a plane other than the rest of the stuff.
Thankfully, there’s mailspring. It’s also buggy, but is much more consistent.
Another vote for Mailspring from me! Although I will definitely be testing the new Outlook once the final version comes out. Unified inbox is my most-wanted feature, and the lack thereof is the biggest reason I don’t use Windows Mail.
Btw @Thom, while it’s built on web tech I am guessing there is a decent amount of native code behind the scenes. But yes for cross platform development it’s clearly the easiest choice. PS Mailspring is also web tech.
Mailspring is also an Electron based hybrid web app. I’ve had a lot of trouble with it though, if you don’t keep it regularly up to date, it tends to end up with a corrupted data store.
If the linked article is correct, there will be a new native Windows email client but it will only be available to those with a 365 subscription. Those unwilling to pay the monthly fee will only have a website from MS.
Pretty sure its going to be a local web app… if you switch outlook to the new outlook it doesn’t work offline currently. Which is indicative of it becoming a web app per what they’ve said about it also. If it can’t run locally offline its useless to me (that is probably a just for the preview but still… its annoying).
The vast majority of Windows applications are not written by Microsoft anyway. So even if they never made another Windows application I don’t see how it would make any significant difference to the range of Windows software that is available. Thus wondering how much life Windows has left seems like an overreaction.
It would be an i.provement, Outlook is trash. If ReactOS was further along, I would ditch Windows altogether.
I don`t get it. You want ditch Windows because you don`t like Outlook to use Reactos with Outlook? I guess you don`t mean that. So what do you mean?
Using outlook, or even the built in email app, is unusual for home users. Plus why does my calendar need to suffer all the same email vulnerabilities as outlook now? Perfect example of apps that shouldn’t be combined.
Another way to look at it … better to have 1 app with the vulnerabilities than two (which get patched at different rates).
The only way to fix it, is for them to fix the vulnerabilities. Regardless of the software architecture.
It’s the usual “angry brag” that some people are compelled to complain about everything. It’s literally the same comment, replace the product/OS/whatever with whatever the article is about, over and over since the old days of the usenet.
If you take a face value these comments, you would think that Outlook is unusable or that Windows completely self destructs within fives minutes of turning on the computer. And yet, millions of corporate folk manage to get their work done for hours on these platforms, for example.
It’s really bizarre. But almost a given.
One day someone will come with a quantum computer that solves NP problems in a milisecond, and someone will complain about how the GUI for the OS is trash and not as good as in the good old days of Windows 95.
I’ve used the Pre-release of Outlook 365 client (web app) and it’s missing some major features found in the full outlook client. I hope they get this all sorted out by next year.
Yeah if it can’t run offline its useless.
Does it have ads?
I’ve been using office 365 with a client recently and it’s been showing product ads under the menu. These show up regularly but today in addition to that there was a full screen popup ad. Ugh!
Users don’t have much right to complain about ads when they’re not paying for the product. But why the hell does microsoft feel the need to show ads to paying customers? This is really tasteless IMHO. Evidently, microsoft sees ads as the future even for paying customers 🙁
It’s not that Microsoft doesn’t want to write native applications, it’s that they don’t want to maintain separate ARM codebases and sort out nasty compiler bugs. I guess we all have to suffer slower web apps or slower snaps (or equivalents)
Native applications mean native-to-Windows apps, not native-to-ARM nor native-to-x86. Microsoft has had platform-agnostic frameworks for building native apps since the advent of .NET over 20 years ago. The problem is that these frameworks more or less suck, and they suck real hard.
The real problems started when Microsoft started moving away from “WinForms”, the classic library for building user interfaces, and instead pushing Metro apps with Windows 8. The Metro frameworks were unusable and Microsoft failed to improve them quick enough, so nobody ever used them and instead stuck to the old tools.
Since then Microsoft has been trying to re-launch Metro and UWP under various different names, which has lead to developer frustration and confusion both inside and outside Microsoft. And they still suck. Hard.
Windows’ app frameworks are simply not very modern. There’s a reason all the fun stuff is happening on iOS and macOS (not really even Android, which also has a lack luster application framework). The native GUI toolkits on Apple’s platforms are just better.