This is likely just a support/cost issue. When you leave something "open" in Windows, it has to be tested and supported and it's not as simple as "all of these things use the same protocols". So they narrowed the support strategy and focused testing on the main email services.
I see no problem with this.
I've had an e-mail address since 1999 or so, back when usa.net was still a thing. Until about this time last year, I was strictly a webmail reader. Never saw the point in configuring Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird/Geary, etc. HTML email inside my browser worked just fine, and it meant I could check it from any computer, to boot.
Then I read some story on HN about a guy getting his gmail account shutdown and subsequently losing access to his emails, his Drive, his Photos, several websites he had hosted through Blogger, etc. And since these were all "free" services provided by Google, when they decided to shut down his account, he had no legal recourse.
The idea of losing 10+ years of emails at the whim of my provider didn't sit well with me, so at that point I installed Thunderbird on my desktop and started keeping a local copy of all my e-mails. Just in case.
From 2003-2008 I used a free hotmail account. Then I got on the gmail train and had all mail forwarded from hotmail to gmail.
Last year I went to check my hotmail account and couldn't find any emails older than 1 year. After some research [1] it seems that if the hotmail account wasn't accessed within the last year, they purge your inbox :(
Moral: Always keep back-ups, don't rely on web-services, especially free ones
[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail...
I was done with grad school last semester, and the department admins immediately shut down all my department accounts. Seven years of academic communication disappeared overnight.
Luckily, after some emailing (CC: head of dept.), they provided me with the MBOX files, which I can load with Thunderbird and a plugin.
Otherwise, my email client would have been my only offline copy.
An operating system like Windows, in my view, should have programs that support open standards and not restrict who you can and can’t use.
I use Claws Mail personally and can find in fractions of a second my entire archive of a dozen accounts starting since 1996 (converted from Eudora until 1998 or 99) where the biggest 5 inboxes sum up to over 42K mails (plus attachements). I have also made few people switch to Claws Mail on Windows too, and none of them wanted to go back. One in particular who needs daily very fast searches on a big database of emails is happy to be able to do that in less than one second instead of Outlook's 10-30 seconds. If you're used to web mail, upgrading to a (good) client can be from a pleasant experience to a life changer.
For those interested: http://www.claws-mail.org/index.php
If you follow that line of thought to the end, you end up in a world where you can only run a program on your computer if the vendor has a business relationship with your OS vendor (or is more powerful than they are).
Say goodbye to general-purpose computing.
Something like that probably:
> Sniggering Linux users who believe in open code and open standards can take a hike. The Online Accounts systems in GNOME, Ubuntu Unity, Plasma, and MATE do the exact same thing as Window 10
ouch. but to be fair you can configure carddav/caldav manually on linux (but well I didn't liked evolution so much, mutt is okish but only for text. well mac mail.app is worse since it can't send csv files correctly (it adds unnecessary lines into it depending on the encoding)) (and well gnome only supports 3 email providers with cal/contact sync in their boxes which is microsoft, google and exchange (you can also add generic smtp/imap of course but it's about caldav/carddav), and one can prolly use nextcloud for carddav/caldav sync which is supported in the box aswell)
Also worth pointing out that iOS and macOS also do, too.
I don't see how MS benefits from only supporting top tier providers except for it being easier to support.
There's mail clients that mess with my attachments???! That's just wrong.
Windows serves three purposes for me:
1) Launch browser
2) Launch VLC
3) Launch Steam
5. close eclipse at 5pm
Or Solidworks, Quickbooks, Photoshop or whatever it is you do between 9 and 5.
I really don't know why people are assuming that MS is being malicious -- they support exactly their direct and realistic competitors to Exchange. If the author seriously thinks that 腾讯首页 or Nextcloud, which doesn't even have an email server component, are sapping users from Exchange he's crazy.
iCloud sync of to-do lists, notes, contacts, calendar, and Handoff between 6 computers and iDevices is a big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem.
It wasn't always reliable, and the first few years were particularly rough, but it's been working flawlessly for me for the last couple of years.
Naturally, there are other people for whom things are not so smooth.
In the future I think Windows will be a paid compatibility layer in Linux. Building on SQL server libraries for Linux could be a start for such a compatibility layer. Cloud and web apps has made Windows desktop more irrelevant.
Most likely there will be an Linux desktop alliance between for example Ubuntu, Amazon, Steam and PC makers that will make the Linux desktop more user friendly.
Configuration tooling is also convoluted and buggy, as they build on top of existing configuration tooling, so now there are more points of failure. And the software repositories are often multiple versions behind the latest stable release.
Ubuntu is doing great things for Microsoft.
read the article. linux/ubuntu has the same issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16162698
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/xFG2JaJ.png [1]: https://i.imgur.com/yLPWx6R.png
I'm guessing that the client was never designed to be a fully fleshed out classic email app. They probably have some baked in ease of use/set up features that they had to explicitly included on a per provider basis. Having a list of pre-approved clients that are guaranteed to work probably satisfies the grand majority of users while leaving these features maintainable.
I've been guilty of it in the past, but you gotta love some good armchair programming (from the OP):
> In my estimate Microsoft, it’s just a matter of changing about six variables in the code and adding some text strings!
I have a Microsoft Account on my work (Office 365) email address.
Windows 8 worked perfectly - if you signed in to Windows with a MS account, it would ask you "do you want to use your personal or organisation account" and then you could add your email account with the same message.
Windows 10 on the other hand just errors out...
https://superuser.com/q/1267281/4386
This is most annoying because Outlook does update the "system" calendar or the home screen, you get none of the rich integrations. Cortana just errors out whenever you try to interact with the calendar.
What's funny is, I can use my Office 365 account on my Mac without problems and use Siri to make appointments, get notifications when to leave etc.
"Sniggering Linux users who believe in open code and open standards can take a hike. The Online Accounts systems in GNOME, Ubuntu Unity, Plasma, and MATE do the exact same thing as Window 10. There are underlying CalDAV and CardDAV sync engines (Evolution Data Server, Akonadi) that power them but the user interface only expose two–three providers like Google and Yahoo! with no option to auto-discover or manually configure any other providers."
I think this takes a needlessly limited view by casting the limits imposed on users of nonfree software onto free software (which is odd because elsewhere the author says they love free software). Here's the overlooked difference: with a free software program, one can improve the code to add the desired functionality and interoperability. Users can even get together and collectively fund a programmer to help them out. By contrast, Microsoft Windows 10 Email app is nonfree (proprietary, user-subjugating). Even technically capable and willing users are prohibited from reading the relevant source code, modifying it, and distributing it to help others. Even if Microsoft alters their code to add missing functionality, users likely gain no software freedom in the process. Users aren't allowed to inspect and rebuild the software. Software freedom leads to trusting that software and proprietary software is often malware (https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html for pointers to how Microsoft's software is often malware). Software freedom is the key to understanding the difference.
This limitation has nothing to do with GNU/Linux systems (unfairly referred to as "Linux" in the article; see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Linux for more on this) per se; software can be ported to other OSes and the desired features could be available there too.
Standards that allow interoperability are a good unto themselves, just like software freedom, and we should push for both, use both, and improve both to meet our needs, not "take a hike" as the author suggests.
With software freedom users don't have to beg a software proprietor (who is also a known NSA collaborator and multinational antitrust violator) to make the software more interoperable. They can help themselves, they can hire someone to help, they can ask the community (perhaps in more kind words than the article) to help. These are potent options that render the software trustworthy (regardless of who wrote it) and with sufficient improvement even cross-platform.
