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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

Solution: don't use Outlook.

Use a better email client.

But isn't this the free Outlook.com email? In fact, in the screenshot itself you can see a link to upgrade to their paid service, Microsoft 365, if you don't want to see ads at all. To me it appears ethical to provide a free, ad-supported service. It actually seems more user-friendly than, say, Gmail, in that it allows you to decide if ads will be in-line with your mailbox content.

Seriously. I don't understand why people put up with this shit.

Or pay for Outlook and do away with ads altogether.

Which email client would you recommend?

> Which email client would you recommend?

Thunderbird

https://www.thunderbird.net

I'm not a fan of thunderbird compared to Outlook. To me it's a bit like LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. I know some people prefer LibreOffice, it was pretty similar 12 years ago and today it's still better in some ways, but I rather use Microsoft Office.

Is Thunderbird accessible through a browser?

Your email can be saved as html and viewable in all browsers.

If you are asking if you can login to a webpage you want webmail: horde, squirrelmail, roundcube.. rainloop looks like gmail, Zimbra, mailspring (has undo send), Cypht, mailpile...

Thanks for all these options. That gives me another topic I can dive in to over the weekend.

The wonderful answer is that it isn't!

Browsers can't, and absolutely shouldn't, do everything.

But there are basically doing everything now? And it works for the vast majority of people

I agree with your point, but disagree in that it should be easy to check your email. The web is the natural solution to this.

Everything? Of course not. Display some images and text from a server? That seems like a perfect use case for a browser.

There are open source web mail clients if you want though - I vaguely remember rainloop (https://www.rainloop.net/) and roundcube (https://roundcube.net/) being ones I looked at back in the day.

Elm or Pine from a terminal are better than something with ads, so just about anything.

> Which email client would you recommend?

Mailspring

https://getmailspring.com/

mutt. It sucks less.

You can but that's not the point.

What is very unusual here is that they are asking you if you want bigger ads, a slower experience, and recommend that you don't chose that option. There is also an ad free, paid alternative in the small print.

It is the opposite of what the usual suggestions are. Generally, the most predominant is the paid option, then the one with big ads, then the one with small ads.

The most probable reason here is that they want to show you that if you don't like integrated ads that look like emails, you can, but it will be terrible. Maybe it is a legal requirement or something.

At least in gaming it's frequently possible for companies to make more money off the ad-supported version of a game than they do off the paid version (translation: advertisers will pay more for your leisure time than you will). Not sure if that's also true in domains like this.

More likely they're emphasizing the alternative that makes them the most money. The user-as-product is what Microsoft missed the boat on while concentrating on Windows lock-in under Balmer.

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