{"id":139,"date":"2023-01-23T18:06:05","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T17:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/?p=139"},"modified":"2023-01-23T18:06:05","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T17:06:05","slug":"on-the-futility-of-using-microsoft-as-an-email-provider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/2023\/01\/23\/on-the-futility-of-using-microsoft-as-an-email-provider\/","title":{"rendered":"On the futility of using Microsoft as an email provider"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My $DAYJOB, like many others, have a Office 365 subscription, using also services like Microsoft’s Outlook for email. While I have, at a previous job, had mixed experiences with Microsoft and their upside-down view on how email should work. After fighting with their abysmal Outlook software<\/a>, and their even worse web interface<\/a>, my previous employer eventually managed to get the company they had subcontracted for email services to open up IMAP, and that was the end of that. With my current employer, I have used IMAP from the start, first continuing to use the Opera Mail client<\/a>, despite it being out of support, and recently moving to its spiritual successor in Vivaldi<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was working fine, I could mostly ignore Outlook and its idiosyncrasies<\/a>. Until 2022-11-01, that is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The powers that be at Microsoft were rolling out several changes, one was to remove support for password log-in, instead forcing everyone to use a web browser for logging in (fortunately, that was postponed a bit), but the other was some kind of update to the IMAP servers that failed horribly. Since it was the email client that started complaining, I first thought it was a bug in Vivaldi<\/a>. And posted about it there. After researching it, I did find that Vivaldi was speaking IMAP correctly, but the servers didn’t understand it. I was pointed to a thread at Microsoft’s support forum<\/a>, where I was far from the only one to have the problem, across different accounts and mail clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One would think that a company that provides a paid-for email hosting service that in an update breaks the support for a standardized network protocol<\/a> would be quick to fix it. But, no. I am writing this at the end of January 2023, and it is still broken. I guess now that the tech oligopoly of Microsoft and Google has embraced and twisted email into whatever they want it to mean<\/a>, they can do what they want and not care about end-users, without much recourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sad state of affairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My $DAYJOB, like many others, have a Office 365 subscription, using also services like Microsoft’s Outlook for email. While I have, at a previous job, had mixed experiences with Microsoft and their upside-down view on how email should work. After fighting with their abysmal Outlook software, and their even worse web interface, my previous employer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,28],"tags":[56,39,54],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email","category-internet","tag-embrace-extend-and-extinguish-2","tag-frustration","tag-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}