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> People treat email has a permanent data store.

Is this strange?

I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.

This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?

No, not conversations, actual data. Think reports, invoices, large PDFs, etc. Emailing files to yourself, that sort of thing. Then they end up with multiple PSTs.

Not even counting Sharepoint syncs...

I very much prefer Outlook's indexing compared to Sharepoint's shitty UI and search capabilities.

I mean, yeah if your choice is between Email or SharePoint, email wins every time.

But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.

Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.

Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.

Copilot search is great for searching SharePoint

I came back to reread this last sentence three times. Well done, sir, well done!

In my experience it is. Unless your IT leadership blew it on Sharepoint governance, which isn't MS's fault.

Yet Sharepoint remains slow garbage.

>Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?

At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.

At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.

I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.

I don't recall any kind of retention limits at Microsoft, at least not for engineers. My mail archives went all the way back to my hire date even 15 years later.

When I worked at Capital One there was a policy of automatically deleting everything that had not been subpoenaed as soon as it was legal to delete it. Usually 3 years or so. Retaining longer was viewed as creating legal risk for future lawsuits. They didn't want to leave evidence lying around if they could help it.

Edit: We were on GSuite.

My company moved to a 3 year retention for legal purposes a few years ago. Somewhat annoying from a nostalgia point of view when I’d get mails pop up from 2095, but everything I need has been in jiras for the last 10 years.

Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.

Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.

so true - I use some outlook vba to send mass emails programmatically

> People treat email has a permanent data store.

Email the protocol has this built in.

> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.

It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.

I don't know about that... unless a good open-source option comes out for corporate email that matches what Outlook/Exchange/M365 offers for calendars and scheduling.

That last part is the real point of integration... then real time chat and messaging status baked in... it's hard to beat. You have services and applications that offer pieces, but none integrate as well.

In the early 2010's I think that both Blackberry and Mozilla had an opportunity to create their own competition in the space and neither did. Google is pretty close, but IMO still a much lesser experience, reinventing a new chat app every other year didn't help their cause at all.

Google seems most likely to capitalize. GSuite is standard practice even among many large companies provided they were founded in the past ~15 years and aren't on the Microsoft teat. Their search is also _so much_ better than Outlook that it's even more useful as a forever-store.

I'm not disagreeing with the search aspect.. I will say that GSuite still doesn't do as well for calendar/scheduling integrations, or messaging beyond email for that matter... it used to, IMO, be as good for interactive messages before they nuked Hangouts in favor of whatever of the half dozen incompatible corp/public chat apps they've had along the way.

When Hangouts had integrated Google Voice and SMS in the app, imo, that was peak poweruser useful.

Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.

If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.

More like email became stripped down and no longer what it was. Mailboxes were always a permanent data store, there were mail files on disk.

>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.

It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.

Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.

When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.

The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.

I never understood the mindset which seemed to interpret “we must preserve this for 5 years” as “we must _delete_ everything after 5 years”. I understand they want to minimize storage costs but they are destroying institutional knowledge. I have recently wanted to refer back to my notes on some older services and discovered that all my old notes have been deleted.

I think the rationale is that they don't want any liable behavior to be discoverable. Institutional knowledge could be in a controlled document storage and the email thread where you negotiated some kickbacks 6 years ago is shredded.

Beyond just email, the group scheduling and calendar experience is pretty much the best you're going to find. Google does pretty good, but it's still not nearly as good as the integrated corp experience with Outlook for scheduling... that said, I hate that I now get teams messages for meetings more than a business day in the future... I have outlook for that, I don't need it in teams... having a calendar and notifications in teams is fine, but limit notifications to things in the near future.

Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".

There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.

A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.

Funny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.

A self sorting shield against to much information if you are at the hub of some organization..