from Hacker News

Windows 11's default mail client will show ads starting 2024

by Farbklex on 10/24/23, 8:07 PM with 155 comments

• by jszymborski on 10/24/23, 8:54 PM

  When I switched to Linux in university, it was as an idle curiosity and the pleasure of knowing my OS was FOSS. I knew I was sacrificing a bit of practicality, but like the person that works on their vintage motorcycle in the garage, the hassle was part of the fun.

  I would often run Windows on a second machine or at work though, I felt equally productive in both Linux and Windows.

  Fast-forward a decade and the Linux desktop situation has improved and the Windows situation has gotten worse, such that switching to Windows 11 is a total non-starter for me.

  I dual-boot Windows 10 w/ Ubuntu because of the odd game or two that is beyond Proton's reach, but that happens less and less each day. I'd be willing to bet that I won't need that Windows partition at all soon.

• by Farbklex on 10/24/23, 8:07 PM

  "Mail" on Windows notified me that starting with 2024, Outlook will replace it as the new default Mail client on Windows. It also asked me if I want to switch now.

  I decided to try it out and during setup of the new free Outlook I got asked how I want to see my ads: As a banner above the mail window or in my inbox.

  This took my by surprise since it essentially means, that the default mail client for Windows now will start serving ads.

  Tweet for reference: https://twitter.com/Farbklex91/status/1716847430510023000

• by jwells89 on 10/24/23, 8:59 PM

  One of the things I’ve appreciated a lot about macOS and iOS is that the stock Mail app is focused more on being a good generic email client than it is on trying to sell iCloud or be a profit center. It’s served me very well for the handful of IMAP addresses I use, with exception to Gmail (which has a dodgy IMAP implementation).

  The Windows Mail client was on its way to becoming a close analogue to Mail.app but I guess those days are over.

• by xnx on 10/24/23, 8:51 PM

  Seems like a lot of companies are aiming for the trifecta of: subscription payments + increasingly worse product + show ads

• by fx1994 on 10/24/23, 8:44 PM

  There's Thunderbird, much better solution than mail or outlook.

• by daft_pink on 10/24/23, 8:47 PM

  I never imagined myself using a Linux desktop everyday, but I don't want to pay Apple for 64gb of RAM and an acceptable number of monitors via my docking station, and Microsoft is just becoming terrible.

  Going to have to figure out what to switch to... Yikes!

• by crop_rotation on 10/24/23, 9:09 PM

  Microsoft seem to be the worst of all the big companies that is surviving just because of extremely hard to dislodge monopolies. Consumer products come with windows, and enterprises opt for windows due to lock in. Office is so entrenched that most companies have little choice but to buy it. And Windows seems to be adding the shittiest features of almost any modern operating system. I use https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 for disabling windows telemetry and the amount of flags for data tracking is insane.

  M$FT have used the Office monopoly to push teams and AD to push Azure, both of which are subpar products. It is hard to find one good product they have made in the last 20 years (and yes VSCode is not it).

• by javcasas on 10/24/23, 9:02 PM

  Of course, ¿what did you expect?

  (yeah, yeah, knee-jerk reaction, but the trend on Windows becoming user-hostile can be seen at this point from the other side of the Milky Way)

• by Macha on 10/24/23, 8:49 PM

  I guess we can expect the nag notifications when people install Thunderbird, or open gmail.com in Edge soon then

• by MiddleEndian on 10/24/23, 8:50 PM

  I actually like Windows Mail (more than web gmail at least lol) so I am bummed out about this development. Gonna have to find some other minimal mail client.

• by nerdjon on 10/24/23, 8:47 PM

  Microsoft seems determined to make all of the wrong choices for Windows.

  I tried the New Outlook after having issues with the default mail app. I was greeted with a message "To add your iCloud account to Outlook, we need to sync your emails, contacts, and events to the Microsoft Cloud."

  I'm sorry WHAT?!? You're telling me that to use a local email service I need to sync with Microsoft servers?

  Someone here please tell me that this is just because it was in beta and all of the features didn't exist yet? Otherwise what the hell is Microsoft thinking?

  For the record I just did not do this and any chance of using Windows for productivity tasks went completely out the Window. Windows was always just primarily for gaming but having email there would have been nice.

• by NotYourLawyer on 10/24/23, 8:53 PM

  Windows just keeps getting worse. 7 was pretty good, 10 is ok, 11 is trash.

  Maybe 2024 will be the year of Linux on my desktop.

• by baz00 on 10/24/23, 9:15 PM

  It'll only show ads if you don't pay for O365. And Google do the same with GMail.

  I am paying for O365 family so none of my family get that. And I think I paid £59 for it last time with some voucher scamming. That gives everyone, 6 people in my case, 1TB storage, all the office desktop apps. I don't think that's a bad deal, especially compared to the shafting you get from Apple these days for icloud.

• by glimshe on 10/25/23, 9:56 AM

  I've used Windows 11 and the new Outlook for a while now, but I've never seen a single ad. Not one. Is it because I have Office 365?

  If that's the case, Microsoft's strategy is that one way or another it wants some money from you: either the subscription, or the ad revenue. I'd be concerned if I had to see ads while being a paying customer.

• by dudul on 10/24/23, 9:12 PM

  I dread the day where my windows 10 machine will automatically upgrade to 11. So far I've been able to decline - even though the "no" button seems to get a bit smaller and better hidden every time. One day I know I'll wake up and it will be windows 11. It will always have been 11. There was no versions before 11.

• by dist-epoch on 10/24/23, 9:04 PM

  I've already opt-in to the new app and it's already showing the ads.

  It's one small text ad, formatted to look like an email message card. I quickly learned to ignore it.

  And no one is forcing anyone to use this app. You can use webmail, Thunderbird, etc...

  I still prefer this app with the ad to opening gmail in the browser.

• by Zufriedenheit on 10/24/23, 8:47 PM

  Good that thunderbird just had some big releases recently. Ready to take over the role i guess.

• by alberth on 10/24/23, 9:25 PM

  OS ad revenue?

  Can anyone find how much revenue is generated in ads from Windows?

  All I can find is revenue for Bing.

  I'm curious to know if the revenue Windows ads are generating is even worth the reduction in UX and consumer sentiment.

• by rekabis on 10/24/23, 8:55 PM

  What an excellent reason to rip that app out using Win10Privacy, and run with something more privacy-friendly like Thunderbird.

• by dmitrygr on 10/24/23, 8:59 PM

  At this point in time, Apple should be paying microsoft for bringing new people to the Apple ecosystem.

• by methou on 10/25/23, 5:58 AM

  Before switching to Fastmail, I started seeing ads on Outlook for windows, Mac, and OWA since a while back ago as a paying customer, then there’s them on gmail, while paying for google one.

  I mean they don’t even care if you are paying.

• by Crontab on 10/24/23, 9:14 PM

  Windows needs new management.

• by ChrisLTD on 10/24/23, 9:08 PM

  I wonder if the eventual plan is to make Windows free for "home" users, and monetize it through ads. In that world, ads in every corner of the OS would be less annoying.

• by stalfosknight on 10/24/23, 9:34 PM

  Why do so many Windows users tolerate shit like this while refusing to consider a much better designed platform that is far more respectful of its users like macOS?

• by jrockway on 10/24/23, 9:08 PM

  Why does Microsoft even bother with a desktop OS these days? They have moved on to The Cloud like everyone else, so people can buy Word and not their OS.

  All Windows really has is a long tail of legacy apps (many of which are very good, and people don't want to give up) and games, and that has to look like a dying business model. (Unfortunately, games are pretty sticky, because they own a game console, and everyone wants access to the console. So if Microsoft says "if you port your game to Linux, you can't be on Xbox", Windows is on indefinite life support.)

• by bananapub on 10/24/23, 9:37 PM

  it's just bizarre that there isn't more embarrassment about how much worse we've made our industry. you've fucked up the economics of your global business desktop OS monopoly so badly that now you're adding ads to your free, bundled-with-the-OS-to-kill-Eudora mail client? what in shit?

• by overgard on 10/24/23, 9:00 PM

  How many people actually use a desktop email app? I use Outlook for work (mostly because the web client is awful), but outside of that I always access my email in a browser.

  Weird decision by Microsoft in my opinion. It seems like the only people that'd bother to setup Windows mail in the first place are power users, and that's the last people you want to piss off with annoying ads.

• by delta_p_delta_x on 10/24/23, 9:14 PM

  There are two Microsofts.

  The first one is extremely developer-friendly, and regularly pushes out superb, high-quality tools and frameworks—many of which are free of charge and open-source—and gives nice deep dives into tech. They also develop pretty interesting alternatives to the UNIX ecosystem. Some examples:

  - the .NET ecosystem and languages (VB.NET, C#, F#);

  - PowerShell (technically this is also a .NET language, but it has made Windows scripting so easy that it deserves a mention on its own);

  - ASP.NET Core (again, part of the .NET ecosystem, but it is very far ahead of almost all other web backends (in terms of functionality, performance, and ease-of-development) that it also deserves a separate mention)

  - TypeScript;

  - Visual Studio Code;

  - Visual Studio Community, the MSVC C++ STL, and the MSVC compiler, `cl.exe`;

  - Direct3D and DirectXMath;

  - WSL

  - the Windows API, the Windows driver model, and the Windows ACL model.

  Many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.

  And there's the pain-in-the-arse, bean-counting Microsoft that justifies adding advertisements, crapware, and generally enshittifying what used to be a superb OS, pushing for software-as-a-service, changing the UX of Office programs every version, not being able to settle on and develop one nice unified UI toolkit for Windows, and (probably therefore) pushing laggy Electron apps like the XBox store, Teams, etc over well-programmed native/.NET ones.

  I use and develop on Windows because I grew up on it. I don't want 'an OS as an IDE'. I want an IDE that does an IDE's job well, and I haven't found anything better than Visual Studio's debugger and profiler.

  I am torn. Linux is still broken for even slightly edge-case use cases (laptop + monitor of very different pixel densities, and hence different scaling ratios; both X and Wayland fail horribly at this whereas Windows eats it up in a heartbeat). I game regularly and am not keen on virtualising or using Wine/Proton (I am convinced there is a performance drop in the general case), and MacOS is a non-starter for me.

• by cvccvroomvroom on 10/24/23, 9:19 PM

  Windows 11... now with more AOL!

• by Dennip on 10/24/23, 9:20 PM

  Is this 'free' outlook different to the version that ships with O365?

• by whelp_24 on 10/24/23, 8:32 PM

  It would be nice of this sort of thing could be made illegal.

• by Propelloni on 10/24/23, 8:53 PM

  The linked article says nothing about showing ads in "New Outlook." It certainly is not below MS to do so and I believe the submitter, but the linked article does not say a word about it.

• by ktosobcy on 10/24/23, 9:07 PM

  Team Thunderbird, gladly supporting and donating.