Proton Mail says Outlook for Windows is Microsoft's new data collection service

I know a guy who worked on scanning SMS messages for keywords to do marketing with. They had some huge telecoms they worked with.

This was also a long time ago. Terrifying stuff; who knows what they do these days.

What I find extra-annoying about the tracking is that it stopped pretending to be helpful. I remember chatting with my spouse on Google Messenger around 2012. We were discussing what to have for dinner when whatever the google assistant was called at the time popped up a message

"Traffic is unusually heavy right now due to an accident on Kirkwood. If you want to pick up a pizza from Avers and be home by six, you should leave work in the next seven minutes."

Was it creepy? Hell yes, but at least it was useful. The companies haven't cut back on spying on me, but, in an effort to pretend that they aren't, they've stopped sharing the useful information with me. Instead, they keep it to themselves to mine for the perfect car advertisement to send to a guy who doesn't have a license.

I would rather make companies that violate people's privacy pay as they're the only entities making profits here.

Business should be paying me to use my data instead.

There's a complete blind-spot in this debate that I rarely see discussed even in security circles.

Grubbing through personal emails to target advertising is unseemly. But we accept companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple as the squalid little filchers they are and take such snooping as a part of life in the digital world now. We should not... be we do accept it.

However, few people sincerely ask how did Google, Microsoft and Apple get so big?

The fool says "by recruiting smart people and working hard at innovation". At best that's a microscopic part of the answer.

A slightly wiser take is that they acquired every competitor and used every trick in the book to sabotage competition. But, again that's only part of the picture.

The answer is that over the past 30 years they've engaged in the biggest, most egregious programme of industrial espionage in history. There isn't a single business in the Western hemisphere who BigTech have not had a total heads-up on their R&D, recruiting, internal development, marketing strategy, trade secrets and financial affairs.

Keeping this conversation limited to whether or not Mavis cares whether Microsoft know what shoes she buys - is part of the trick.

Sure no individual will pay for privacy. That's not where anyone who cares about liberal democracy and free markets should be looking.

Pretty amazing, they make you pay a very high monthly free to use office and now this is just going to be a web wrapper.

> What product isn’t filled with adware or telemetry now?

Linux and BSD come readily to mind.

Unfortunately, I dislike thunderbird with a passion. In my anecdotal experience, its search is terrible - not to mention that there are two of it: a search option in the top panel that misses about 50% of relevant messages, and a very featureful search option buried within the menu bar that misses about 20% of relevant messages. Out of necessity, I've trained myself to just reboot to Windows any time I really need to find a particular email that I know I have somewhere. I also don't particularly like Thunderbird's UI, but that is something I'm able to compromise on.

Not meant to be a rant, but rather: please, someone, is this really the best we have?

2nd for Thunderbird, I like it alot

I have really tried to like Thunderbird. I can't. Its search is broken, it's very slow, it inserts awkward formatting in emails (Ie space below and above each line), the reply functionality is awk etc. I know it's time to go when I have to switch back to fastmail's web client to do anything "serious".

I still have it installed because I want to like it, but.. No. This post has inspired me to delete it.

> There exists no mail client that is as full featured as outlook

Possibly. It may also be the most feature-bloated unintuitive UI. Using Linux myself, but always astounded when helping my non-technical mother with the latest murky weirdness thrown at her by Outlook. Some people just need simple mail facilities, not a Rube Goldberg 'ribbonware' cube. And on Windows maybe most people want easy & simple.

Evolution.

I would add though, that TB has features, that Outlook does not have, so it is not like TB only implements a subset of functionality that Outlook offers, but rather it implements different features and, at least for me, it is way better than Outlook ever was.

Does Astroid feel done? Because the last commit was 7 months ago.

Rainloop is an okay, simpler webmail client. It is lacking in a lot of features that Roundcube has, but sometimes you just want easy access to your email when you're away from your full-featured desktop client.

K-9 is good; it's going to be rebranded as Thunderbird for Android soon. FairEmail is also good. It has a different set of trade-offs from K-9, so better for some people, worse for others.

Oh, I thought this was "new Outlook" that replaced Mail and not O365 Outlook.

The same way we had multiple Skype's and they were dramatically different. Is this not the case anymore? Is "new Outlook" the replacement for all Mail/Outlooks?

I'm not following. Is there a TOS loophole around "cache mail data in Azure" that permits my paid account email data to be handled differently by Microsoft than, say, Chase bank handles my financial data stored somewhere in their cloud? And password? Are you claiming they have a pain text store of my password?

The expectation is generally that your message data in a free account is subject to being used for some internal purpose.

But we don't expect paid account message data to be used in any way. We pay for the service and the storage.

Maybe my expectations, while possibly naive, are nevertheless baseline and subject to change from new information.