"In only the last three days Google [0], Apple [1], and Microsoft [2]
have each been the subject of dispiriting security news stories
exposing their deceit and fundamental lack of trustworthiness."
I wrote the above here [3] yesterday in the context of how we approach
the problem of not just big-tech monopolies - among whom who we might
theoretically decide who to trust more - but a coordinated data
trading cartel made up of a network of treacherous entities and
"partners".
Staying on-topic, in the current context of email, with all of the big
three providers now unashamedly looting though your private
correspondence, either at their server or your endpoints, is email
effectively dead for business?
Using a more trustworthy provider like Proton or Tuta, or even running
your own mail servers only kicks the can down the road, since any
messages To: or Cc: recipients at defective providers is a leak.
I bought something on my phone recently and I'm guessing Gmail saw the email from the vendor or something and a few seconds later the Microsoft web browser on my work computer started advertising for precisely that item. I felt more than a little violated. People used to call you crazy for saying this was tracked and it's all normalized now. It's more than a little dystopian.
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.
Accidentally revealing your intelligence gathering capability is a
famous trade-off problem. The Allies in WW2 occasionally had to let a
ship get sunk rather than make it obvious that the Enigma had been
cracked [0]. Plausible alternatives are usually assured to be in
place, for example radar in the above case, or parallel construction
in modern law enforcement.
Bigtech are likely increasingly careful about making it too obvious
that certain technologies (for de-anonymisation and correlation) are
in use. Most people will still believe in unlikely coincidences rather
than sophisticated behavioural analysis and covert monitoring of
audio systems etc.
They cooperate with providers and act as a middleman between them and advertising buyers... visit a site of a cooperation partner of utiq (e.g. Süddeutsche Zeitung) on a phone and a banner of them pops up. Probably kicks in once the tracker sees you're coming from a network range that matches a phone ISP.
Facebook suggests friending someone I worked with at once place 18 years ago and never spoke to or messaged since, and they show me adverts for both breast enlargements and erectile disfunction, and for hyper-local events in countries I don't live in and for people with citizenships I don't have.
Tuta ran a blog post about how Microsoft was out to get them because users of Tuta couldn't create Microsoft accounts.
The kick?
It's because Tuta was incompetent and we're using the same domain for public users of their service as for internal corporate use. They registered the domain as an azure tenant to that point.
Then we're confused why users of @tuta couldn't create Microsoft accounts. The best part is disallowing "personal accounts" with azure tenant domains is a tenant setting. But they already committed multiple levels of security breakage by mixing anonymous and corporate use of the same domain.
I even tested that they infact had an azure tenant with the very domain they claimed Microsoft blocked.
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.
The "new" outlook is a disgrace. Using it to access a third party email provider results in Microsoft transferring your credentials to their server so the server can sync all your emails... for reasons, of course.
Yes this is truly annoying part of modern tech. They used to say if you don't pay for it, you are the product. Now even if you pay for it you are still the product because they can do whatever they want with your data anyway.
It happens, because financial figure optimizer role people see some potential that it could works and try to squeeze every last penny out of it, even celebrate themselves for it, and we, by and large, let them get away with it, instead of giving them the middle finger.
They must have been jealous of Alphabet’s profits.
Honestly, they need to change or they’ll lose the market. Apple has grown quickly, and Linux is actually seeing decent growth thanks to SteamDeck. There’s also been Chromebooks, but I don’t know how common those really are.
I would also assert this question would've been better asked scoped to non-OSS type products. You don't place ads or dragnet telemetry if you also don't care about whether people use your product or not.
Does anyone have a good desktop email client they recommend for windows or linux or even self hosted? All the ones ive tried are pretty awful... The problem is outlook was actually good in the past.
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?
Search is still as bad as it ever was, unfortunately it remains the most feature complete alternative (and free).
And of course, Microsoft makes it impossible to use their services with it. Or so difficult you just give up after it breaks for the 5th time in a month.
Most everyone has moved to webmail implementations, since it's good enough. I think even folks with the tech know-how to self-host a webmail client have done so. Personally, I use RoundCube.
I'm in the same boat. I've even installed Thunderbird and synced a mail account just to be able to find a specific mail that neither webmail nor the Android app were able to find.
> 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.
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.
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.
Have you maybe configured it to search online or something?
I have used TB for years and still use it daily, daily getting some 30+ emails, that I tag and sort into folders and all that. My TB profile is several GB in size. Search is instant for me, on all my hardware, including older laptops and even an old X200, with some upgraded parts.
I am not sure how it could be slow, so I am guessing something like your search needs to look for things online maybe, instead of in small inboxes and local folders.
I have all my email going back to then too. Many GB. I always download all of it locally. The global search bar (which searches all of it) appears instantaneous. It must be well under under 200ms. Every time I've verified the result with grep the results are accurate. I have no idea how they get it so fast.
Searching within a folder is different. It does a linear scan. If you don't search the body it's fast enough - a few seconds I guess on a big folder. If you search the body of the email in a big file, then yes it can take a while.
The Spacing isn't that weird. It just wraps paragraphs inside of paragraph tags. If you use Shift-enter you get a new line w/out a paragraph. The only real change I've had to do there is just hit enter once, where I used to hit twice.
It's a little bit different but Astroid is great and my favorite GUI desktop client right now. Lightweight, flexible and renders html all right. It uses notmuch, which takes a little bit of setup but in return you get really good search which I never felt a need to tune. You should also try out if either thunderbird, evolution or kmail does it for you.
If you're up for terminal, aerc (optionally supports notmuch).
roundcube for self-hosted webmail. cypht could also be worth checking out. maybe later on mailpile when/if they get their 2.0 out.
I wouldn't be that absolute about it, but nothing comes to mind as missing or broken from the top of my head so far. That being said, it does look like it would benefit from some more support: https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/669
It's lightning fast, to the point I can keep all my emails online (>70000 posts), all accounts, all mail lists, everything, since day one about 30 years ago, and search through them at any moment.
Runs pretty much everywhere, including ARM, also there are tools to import mail and contacts from Outlook.
On Mac You can still use the old Outlook. You have to switch back everytime there is an update but it's very easy.
The new one is awful because it does not have tabular list view, with sortable columns such as: datetime, from, to, cc, etc which are critical for me.
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.
I have tried several, and liked none of them. I'm currently on Geary, but it's lacking in functionality, and it has things like search results being a bit different upon each of my searches. Starred messages cannot be shown on top. Eyeroll.
I think Evolution and Thunderbird are the top contenders, and of the self-hosted ones, Roundcube.
Until wordpress.com removed the number of their partners they were sharing data with they had about that number, including one company that has a Data Retention period of 4320 days - that's almost 12 years.
Well, luckily for me, the new Outlook is a crappy web app that replaced my perfectly good Windows Calendar, which is accessible with my screen reader and starts in an instant, with .. this web app junk that's worse than Discord and Slack and Element combined. So I don't use that.
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.
No. I'm not. It's not the point what [company x] is doing with our data *internally*. I accept this is the age we live in. Besides, insurance and banks are the OGs of data and risk and have been mining our data for centuries.
What new are the "Free" products. I'm wondering about is the Moral Relativism and corruption of those developers, project managers, and leadership of "free" projects on the business class developers, project managers, and leadership.
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?
Security
Outlook Mobile temporarily stores and indexes user data (including email, attachments, calendar information, and contacts), along with login credentials,[28] in a "secure" form on Microsoft Azure servers located in the United States.[29] On Exchange accounts, these servers identify as a single Exchange ActiveSync user in order to fetch e-mail. Additionally, the app does not support mobile device management, nor allows administrators to control how third-party cloud storage services are used with the app to interact with their users. Concerns surrounding these security issues have prompted some firms, including the European Parliament, to block the app on their Exchange servers.[30][31][32] Microsoft maintains a separate, pre-existing Outlook Web Access app for Android and iOS.[32]
I assume "free email" refers to Outlook.com email service. It contains ads and probably some level of data sharing. However this article is mostly about the Outlook desktop email client -- in theory you could use this email client without actually using Microsoft's email service (i.e. only used with Gmail etc), although difficult with Windows 11 Home edition.
I like proton mail, but I would prefer to self host at this point.
All of the products they have can be self hosted (mail, calendar, drive, vpn). Or have local device only equivalent with optional sync ability (pass).
I’ll probably still toss them a few dollars tho because I realize most people won’t care this much about self hosting. Plus they seem like a good company overall. At least for now.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953618