Windows 10 could have synced email, contacts, calendars with all major providers | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10 could have synced email, contacts, calendars with all major providers

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124 pointskaplun74 comments

Outside of Outlook at work, I can't even remember the last time I used an actual "client" for e-mail. I use the browser interface of the couple different email services I use.

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.

Local email backups are one compelling reason.

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.

I've had a similar experience.

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...

And you can download everything from Google with Takeout:

https://takeout.google.com

mbsync[0] is handy for snapshotting an IMAP account, either for (local) archival or migration to another account.

[0]:http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html

In addition, you should also considering buying a domain for yourself and then using Google Apps or one of the other alternatives to host it. It's such a huge hassle to change email address everywhere, you are better off having control over it as well.

I recently did this, with Fastmail as the email provider, and picked a domain name that is short and has no ambiguous characters when read aloud over the phone.

> short and has no ambiguous characters

Damn, I totally did not think of that. I used my last name which is neither short nor easily pronouncable over the phone (even for French/German native speakers).

Also I used a .org (.com was taken), which regular people do not “get” when telling them in person. This happened a few times now, e.g. in a store and at the doctors office, I had to type it in myself in the end. So I’d recommend choosing a .com domain over anything else.

But for me it’s too late to change it now, as I’ve been using my domain and the associated email address for >5 years.

One small negative aspect about your domain though: It might look like a spammers/spam email domain name to some, because of the impersonal nature of it. At least that was my impression when I first saw it in your profile.

The spammy appearance didn't occur to me until months later when an old friend pointed out that it suits my personality. I had a good laugh.

I've just lived through that, sort of.

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.

USA.NET is still a thing: https://www.netaddress.com/

I use an actual client every single day, and leave the browser for those rare moments I need to go to an internet cafe.

That’s really not accurate. They can still test the main services, but if third party services don’t work then I can’t see they have to do any more work. It’s not like you get unpaid support for Windows already.

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.

"Outside of Outlook at work, I can't even remember the last time I used an actual "client" for e-mail. "

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

It's likely that was the reason - though I do see a problem with it.

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.

The phone is where it matters. That's where I want notifications and sharing integration and all that stuff.

Too bad outlook fights integration into windows.

I think the author is being unintentionally ironic with the title. Windows 10 does have support for all major email providers. The article is claiming it could just as easily have support for niche ones as well.

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.

QQ, Yandex or GMX are niche? You're suffering from a severe case of US-centrism.

The point is that it supports all the necessary standards, so if it just had a way to add a custom provider and let the user specify protocols and servers, it'd work.

In addition, albeit a stupid conclusion, by supporting all major email providers, they are supporting the majority of email users around the world.

Honestly, the decision to lock down to a golden path smells more to me like a way of keeping support responsibilities constrained. What happens if the integrating service has a quirk? Microsoft and that service might argue which service is at fault and in the meantime customers will blame Windows.

It's probably this. For any "open standard" there's going to be a few different interpretations of what that means across the board. Different services often have sightly different ideas about how their APIs should work, which causes weird edge cases. Supporting all clients arbitrarily without first making sure they all work is a headache for devs and is likely to result in crashes/data loss/etc.

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.

It would be interesting to run CalDav and CardDav compliance tests against all the providers and see who's actually compliant. This seems like a "We don't want to deal with someone wondering why their ______ service won't work even though it's returning a completely invalid response" decision.

Windows could have had a proper update system that security updates all software not just Microsoft products. Instead we got the Windows store updates which is a strange in that normal Windows programs do not get security patched.

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.

Ubuntu has gotten less user-friendly over the years. Out of the handful of distros I use, it is the only one that gives me frequent crashes with the various widgets that come with the distro's default desktop environment.

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.

> 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.

read the article. linux/ubuntu has the same issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16162698

Why settle for promoting support for open protocols and standards when you have the power to pick winners and losers in the market?

How is this any different from Google arbitrarily deranking/delisting search results, or YouTube arbitrarily demonetizing videos?

in those cases, people are also rightfully annoyed, but you can’t tackle all the worlds problems in a single blog post

What would be a worse headline?

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)

The GNOME accounts panel allows the addition of arbitrary CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP, SMTP accounts.

Also worth pointing out that iOS and macOS also do, too.

where? https://imgur.com/a/apKjy (ubuntu latest, I also have a fedora but I only have the machine remotly which I can't access at the moment, but I'm 100% sure that is has no way to setup caldav/carddav directly inside the accounts panel)

I can confirm that at least Fedora 26 cannot. You have to go via evolution.

> The only ones who get a free pass on this is macOS and iOS users. These two platforms have excellent support for and let users and businesses setup CalDAV and CardDAV accounts on their devices without pretending to be, ironically enough, an Apple iCloud account.

Are they really "picking" winners by going with the largest providers? iOS allows you to pick other providers, but it has an easy to use interface for adding email addresses for iCloud, Exchange, Yahoo, AOL, outlook.com and Gmail.

I don't see how MS benefits from only supporting top tier providers except for it being easier to support.

> well mac mail.app is worse since it can't send csv files correctly (it adds unnecessary lines into it depending on the encoding))

There's mail clients that mess with my attachments???! That's just wrong.

After spending a rather long time without Windows and Outlook I've recently been using the current version of the desktop and web client. It's quite functional and the workflow and features work intuitively and it actually looks nice but the font sizes and layout really bother me. Having used a Mac for very long the font rendering of Outlook on Windows makes it even worse for me. I find it more work to read and identify what to read. I have noticed a certain number of individuals at my previous workplace often missed some e-mails and thinking about it made me remember that they Windows Outlook users and where I work now a lot of people simply don't seem to read their e-mails and everyone is using Outlook on Windows.

This is their junky Windows Store mail app, right? I'm an Outlook jockey, so it's been a while since I've tried to use that - primarily because it wasn't all that usable.

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!

But, you can? If you open the mail app and choose add account pop3/imap is an option. What is this guy smoking?

But can you sync calendars and contacts? CalDAV and CardDAV are the standards talked about in the article. They’re supported internally, but you seem to have no way to add the URLs if it’s anything other than the mentioned providers.

The article is about the CalDAV and CardDAV protocols which is the IMAP equivalent for syncing your calendars and contacts.

So the article incorrectly titled as it uses word "email" while W10 does support arbitrary POP/IMAP/SMTP mail systems.

This blog post uses a work around featured in another blog post on the net. I filed a bug for this a while ago (after discovering said post) on their Feedback app, several times. I'd really love to believe in Microsoft and their push for UWP and a better ecosystem but their priorities aren't on functioning and featureful software but instead only appearing they are building functioning and featureful software.

It took a long time, but this is one of the things that Apple seems to have finally gotten the hang of.

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.

You’re actually talking about the same open protocols here. macOS/iOS lets users configure it from any provider, but Windows has limited configuration to a handful of branded providers. Even though they’re all using the same set of protocols.

Hand-off of phone phone calls and copy & paste between devices impressed me the most.

Every now and again I'll forget my phone in the car. I only find out about it when an incoming phone call starts ringing on my Mac.

One thing that I actually hate on Windows 10 compared to Windows 8 is the native apps - it is a huge step backwards.

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.

I tried using the Mail app for my work Office 365 email account because the web UI is so awful. Turned out the app is pretty much exactly the same. Bulk operations, except deleting (the one bulk operation I never wanted), are pretty much impossible to do; simple UI features, like copy/paste are broken in several ways; search is close to useless; annoying extra "features" I have to turn off ("@" replies, chat). Any benefit OS integration provides is completely negated, and then some, by all the other inconveniences of the app.

The article says:

"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.

Is there Gnome integration for CalDAV, out of interest? I’m always interested in knowing how Gnome and KDE fairs against Windows.

It’s mentioned in the article. GNOME (and KDE) supports it, but has the same problem as Windows where they only let you configure it from major branded providers. You can open Evolution, configure it there, and have it work globally in all GNOME apps, but this is poorly documented.

KDE/Plasma supports both custom CalDAV[0] and "GroupDAV"[1] (seems to be a subset of CalDAV+CardDAV according to Wikipedia) servers.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/xFG2JaJ.png [1]: https://i.imgur.com/yLPWx6R.png

Don't want Windows near my mails / contacts / cal anyway.

Windows serves three purposes for me:

1) Launch browser

2) Launch VLC

3) Launch Steam

4. launch eclipse at 9am

5. close eclipse at 5pm

Same for me but with Ubuntu for Windows SSH'd into my development server. In that respect I don't know why the OP was downvoted so much. I don't think any of us use Win10's Metro-esque apps it promotes so much or try to make it like a phone with notifications and integrations.

s/eclipse/Visual Studio/

Or Solidworks, Quickbooks, Photoshop or whatever it is you do between 9 and 5.

I try my best never to close Visual Studio... some of the solutions I work on are so painful to reload. Double-click the sln, ho to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, come back, and it's still thrashing disk and locked up. Much better to keep everything warm.

Funny, I do all three of these on Linux.

No you don't. If I could Steam effectively on *nix I'd have dropped windows years ago.

Not sure what "you" you're talking about. I'm telling you the truth about my Steam use, so your comment feels pretty weird.

It's true though that the availability of games is much less on Linux.

>"I do all three of these on Linux"

Well yes you can launch Steam on Linux and yes perhaps play a small selection of games.

My "No you don't" comment was aimed at highlighting the vast majority of Steam usage cases is still Windows only. In the classic consumer sense it's still essentially unusable on linux:

If >10% of my steam library works on Linux I'd be surprised.

Your mileage may differ but ~50% of my library is playable on linux, purchased over many years with no thought towards linux compatibility. 99% of the time I spent playing could be done on linux, so I switched over my main gaming PC. The downside was losing access to a lot of games I don't play anyway, which is ok.

Just checked - officially just under a third of my library has *nix compatibility. Impressive compared to my 10% estimate, broken compared to the 100% windows working.

I'm hoping things have changed, but based on my last linux gaming adventure I'm very wary - seemed like a complete crapshoot as to whether your distro's audio and gfx setup aligns with the game and even then the FPS rate is a complete luck of the draw. And god help you if you're not on a standard ubuntu gnome setup...

The OS isn't broken, the software you're deciding to buy is. Take it up with the developer who decided to not write cross platform, it's %currentyear%.

That's a fine attitude to have in the FOSS world and arguably correct from a philosophical point of view.

Practically it's a complete non-starter though. The reality is the majority of my games don't work on Linux and frankly I have better things to do than mail campaigns about cross platform.

So gamers will stay with windows via pure inertia & it'll continue to be a self-reinforcing cycle.

That is not the direction the trends indicate.

Steam's Linux library and client usage continues to grow, and Vulkan (Vulcan?) speaks for itself.

If you don't like Windows, why do you keep supporting games that require you to have it?

When's the last time you've tried? I think you'd be pleasantly surprised, especially if you like to play any Valve games or smaller indie games.

You're right - almost a third. Better than the 10% I floated. I'm suitably impressed.

Unfortunately that does little to help the cause though - 33% is enough to get me to say "not bad", but when you pitch the average consumer with a "you can totally use 33% of this cars features" well realistically that salesperson is getting laughed at.

> you can totally use 33% of this cars features

Bad analogy.

A better one: out of all these cars, you can pick 33% of them.

The games you can use are functional.

Not really - worse.

The bulk of gamers already have Steam profiles with games. And since the majority of those will be Windows users they wouldn't have selected only linux compatible ones.

i.e. They're in the same position as me - switching to linux would kill the majority of their games (2/3rds in my case) AND limit any future selections.

It's a complete non-starter.

You can pick 33% of these games - oh, and here's $75 that you would have spent on Windows.

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