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Microsoft IT

Microsoft Makes Outlook for Mac Free To Use (theverge.com) 47

Posted by msmash from the PSA dept.
Microsoft is making Outlook for Mac free to use today. From a report: Outlook is now available free in Apple's App Store, and you no longer need a Microsoft 365 subscription or Office license to use it. It's a surprise move that coincides with Microsoft's push to make its Windows desktop Outlook email client more web-powered. Outlook for Mac includes support for Outlook.com accounts, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and any email provider that has IMAP support. Microsoft redesigned its Mac email client in 2020, with a user interface that's optimized for Apple's latest macOS design changes.
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Microsoft Makes Outlook for Mac Free To Use More

Microsoft Makes Outlook for Mac Free To Use

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  • Does it still force top posting?

    What we really want to know...

    • Does it still force top posting? What we really want to know...

      Do I really want to Google "top posting"? It's a bit too early to deal with my retinas on fire.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        When an email client defaults to putting reply text above the original text, you need to use "top surgery" to cut the blank space and cursor out of the place out doesn't belong, and then fix up the signature block below with "bottom surgery".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cstacy ( 534252 )

        You'll know it as soon as you see an example.

        Does it still force top posting?

        Do I really want to Google "top posting"? It's a bit too early to deal with my retinas on fire.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I'm still fighting for manilla folders to send inter-office mails. Nothing cheers me up more than to see that new envelope with a memo for me sitting there in the mail room inbox! Then I open it and there in perfect penmanship with the personal touch is my memo: "Get email already you loser!"

      • Re:Do not want. (Score:4, Funny)

        by msauve ( 701917 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @06:32PM (#63348505)
        > I hate top posting too, but we're stuck with it.

        I use Thunderbird, you insensitive clod.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by msauve ( 701917 )
            Thunderbird came out of Eudora, not Netscape.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by youn ( 1516637 )

              I believe you have your history mixed up. You must be referring to Eudora OSE(v8): Eudora Did write a set of import plugins as Penelope on top of Thunderbird when they abandoned the original Eudora Program (v7). However thunderbird had been around for a few years Thunderbird is a fork from the original Mozilla codebase which had an email client as part of netscape suite

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by antdude ( 79039 )

          I use SeaMonkey, you whippersnappers. Get of my lawn!

  • Outlook on Android is free it works great too since I have so many emails addresses. There's no silly need for multiple apps.

  • "New" Outlook, right? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Shag ( 3737 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:21PM (#63347753) Journal

    Unfortunately, the "new" version is once again crippled when it comes to things like calendaring, so unless you can switch off "New Outlook" and revert to the old feature set, it's not very useful in a business or other scheduled environment.

    • Unfortunately, the "new" version is once again crippled when it comes to things like calendaring, so unless you can switch off "New Outlook" and revert to the old feature set, it's not very useful in a business or other scheduled environment.

      Wait, don't tell me...let me guess. That switch is in the paid version, right?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Shag ( 3737 )

        It's in 16.70 (23021201) under Volume License 2019, at least. There's a little slider next to the search field at the top right of the window. Every several weeks Outlook cheerily informs me that the next time I restart it, I'll get "New Outlook" and when that happens I have to pick File -> something ("Old Outlook" maybe?) and get several more weeks.

        One of these days I'll find the free time to see whether $ork provides instructions on getting Apple's calendar to work with multiple shared Outlook calend

      • That's funny. The current "paid" version of Outlook for Mac is awful. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was crippled. The calendar has duplicate events. No one (even admins) don't know how to get rid of them. A major corporate event is owned by everyone, anyone can delete. Some events, no one owns. Can't set notification for events owned by someone else. Creating events is unclear. Two apps in one is a disaster. Email by default forces formatting. Forcing Teams on events that don't use Tea

        • I have used lots of different email clients and calendar clients. None have been this bad. They should fire the entire Outlook team and its management, destroy the source code, and all documentation. They'd be better off recommending any other email client and calendar. It's that bad.

          After reading that laundry list of pre-release fix actions, I must say I agree with you. What exactly is the excuse for all that? Most of it seems to be around permissions.

    • They should bring back Outlook Express. Just email, nothing else. Okay, maybe viruses, too... But that's it!

  • Gives Microsoft Access to All Your Mail (Score:3, Informative)

    by Slashdot ( 85645 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:25PM (#63347769)

    I've never used the Mac version but I know that the iOS version doesn't read mail directly. It passes your login credentials to Microsoft and they read the mail on your behalf and supply it to the Outlook client.

    In other words, if you use Outlook then Microsoft has all your email.

    • I'm pretty sure that's the whole point of Microsoft 365.
      All your stuff goes into Microsoft's cloud and at some point you'll need to start paying to access it.
      Or, as the company I work for is finding out, the great price they offered a couple of years ago is now 20% higher because all our stuff is in their cloud so what are we going to do about it?
      I'm guessing the price is going to go up again this year too.
  • I use Apple Mail quite happily in our "Microsoft" environment at work.
    More of the stuff at work has migrated to Teams, this will just be a pathway to get more people to end up using teams so MS has an even greater amount of data to exploit

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by martinX ( 672498 )

      I happily use Outlook on my Mac at work. I only use it for work email, and since Apple Mail won't get through our firewall (the work environment is hostile to Macs), it's iCloud Mail for personal mail.

      I like Outlook, and I think it's better than Apple Mail. Apple Mail just seems clunky, even without comparison to anything else.

  • It is Microsoft! It's a trap!

  • Outlook (Score:3)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:39PM (#63347857) Homepage Journal

    The only email client that keeps getting worse each iteration with no end in sight.

    I'm amazed anyone still likes that steaming pile of poo.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Well id you have office 365 it's there for "free" ( as in beer), well at ,east no additional cost, and now mac users get it for free ( even if the feature set is somewhere limited in the free version) question question,even with the limitations is this version of outlook any better than the default mail app on osx ( remember a thing that is free and has a brand name, does not need to be very much better than the default to win) and as others hav said, this is a wiehecke to upsell people on office 365

  • Not sure this changes much? (Score:3)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @04:14PM (#63347985) Journal

    As a Mac user at home, I'm happy to hear I can use Outlook at no charge if I want to.

    But I'm thinking Microsoft only did this because they know they've got a near monopoly at this point on hosting Exchange servers for Outlook users?
    Not many business I know of run Exchange on site anymore. It's cheaper to just get the free mailbox included with each O365 monthly subscription.

    The Mac users wanting Outlook are probably just signing into corporate accounts where MS got paid already?

  • That's still more than it's worth, IMNSHO. Let me know when they'll start paying me to use it.

    As an IMAP client, at least, it's second-rate at best.

    • Well, maybe not *everyone*, but almost everyone using Outlook is doing so because their employer mandates its use. So, if you use Outlook at work, you are being paid to use it.

      I know, it's a matter of perspective, but I think Microsoft really doesn't want to know what employees would choose if they had the choice. Think about how many people use Gmail or Yahoo as their personal email, and that gives you an idea of how terrible Outlook really is.

  • No Thanks, now if that paid me to use it, maybe. But I would want something like 100 USD per each day I go into Outlook.

  • A few years back, my company (yes, we're Mac based) started migrating everyone to Outlook. I was among the beta testers for my department (at the time, roughly 600 people [a company about 2000 people strong at that point] and, of those 600, maybe 10 of us were testing Outlook). Up until that point, we had been using Mail.app exclusively for...at least a decade, probably 2.

    When they migrated me, it was a result of me filing enough bug complaints about how our (in-house at the time) Exchange server would ca

  • I gave up outlook on pc years ago when it just wouldnâ(TM)t play properly with imap email servers. I tracked the problem down and there was literally a document that stated outlook wasnt fully compatible with imap. I just switched to zimbra webmail and that worked fine. Meanwhile i got a mac and apple mail worked fine. I checked out outlook recently on the mac and it doesnt seem to see my apple contacts. I have to duplicate everything into outlook to have my contacts that inuse on my iphone and

  • As an Apple user, I've been generally satisfied with the platform, but have felt for a long time that something is missing. My Microsoft loving brethren have long detailed their experience with Outlook - from snarky, creepy emails from Microsoft which suggest I followup with my coworkers on tasks I completed long ago, to bugs which inexplicably reappear in subsequent versions, to hard-drive wiping viruses - but being a Mac user has always left me feeling left out. Now I'll be able to relate to what the r

  • Uh! No! Just No!

    I have had to use Outlook for years in my day job. Now that I don't have a day job and my computer is my own, no thanks. I'll pass.

  • When Microsoft offers something for free there is ALWAYS a catch. It's the same as seeing a $100 bill sitting at the edge of a pond but a 12 foot alligator is only a few feet away eyeing that bill up. Do you take the bait? Go ahead, I dare you.
  • Why WOULD I want anything from Microsoft including Outlook on my Mac ? Haven't ever needed Outlook for work related on my home Mac, because I won't do any work/read stuff on my time off. Retired now - moot point. My Apple mail works fine. Don't have a need for it and don't want it !!
    • I was a Windows user starting with WFW311 circa 1993. Windows had been getting progressively worse through the versions. WIN2K wasn't bad but for some reason my peripherals gradually stopped working. BlackIce was a really good firewall but IBM didn't update it after WIN2K, could not install it on later versions. I had to take my WINXP netbook off the internet after one too many malware downloads thanks to a Microsoft firewall that doesn't.

      By the time Vista came out it required replacing your computer
  • next step will be to give it to apache foundation, next to google wave.... please dear microsoft, let it die with dignity!

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