
Windows 10 could have synced email, contacts, calendars with all major providers - kaplun
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-pim-sync-partnersonly
======
ChicagoDave
Outside of Outlook at work, I can't even remember the last time I used an
actual "client" for e-mail. I use the browser interface of the couple
different email services I use.

This is likely just a support/cost issue. When you leave something "open" in
Windows, it has to be tested and supported and it's not as simple as "all of
these things use the same protocols". So they narrowed the support strategy
and focused testing on the main email services.

I see no problem with this.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Local email backups are one compelling reason.

I've had an e-mail address since 1999 or so, back when usa.net was still a
thing. Until about this time last year, I was strictly a webmail reader. Never
saw the point in configuring Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird/Geary, etc. HTML email
inside my browser worked just fine, and it meant I could check it from any
computer, to boot.

Then I read some story on HN about a guy getting his gmail account shutdown
and subsequently losing access to his emails, his Drive, his Photos, several
websites he had hosted through Blogger, etc. And since these were all "free"
services provided by Google, when they decided to shut down his account, he
had no legal recourse.

The idea of losing 10+ years of emails at the whim of my provider didn't sit
well with me, so at that point I installed Thunderbird on my desktop and
started keeping a local copy of all my e-mails. Just in case.

~~~
gitgud
I've had a similar experience.

From 2003-2008 I used a free hotmail account. Then I got on the gmail train
and had all mail forwarded from hotmail to gmail.

Last year I went to check my hotmail account and couldn't find any emails
older than 1 year. After some research [1] it seems that if the hotmail
account wasn't accessed within the last year, they purge your inbox :(

Moral: Always keep back-ups, don't rely on web-services, especially free ones

[1] [https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/outlook_com/forum/oemail...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-orestoremail/all-my-old-hotmail-emails-have-been-
deleted-how-do/fbb99c4f-80c3-4f2c-9d75-c2c3bd8bd107?auth=1)

~~~
rodrigocoelho
And you can download everything from Google with Takeout:

[https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com)

------
Spivak
I think the author is being unintentionally ironic with the title. Windows 10
does have support for all major email providers. The article is claiming it
could just as easily have support for niche ones as well.

I really don't know why people are assuming that MS is being malicious -- they
support exactly their direct and realistic competitors to Exchange. If the
author seriously thinks that 腾讯首页 or Nextcloud, which doesn't even have an
email server component, are sapping users from Exchange he's crazy.

~~~
dahauns
QQ, Yandex or GMX are niche? You're suffering from a severe case of US-
centrism.

------
inlined
Honestly, the decision to lock down to a golden path smells more to me like a
way of keeping support responsibilities constrained. What happens if the
integrating service has a quirk? Microsoft and that service might argue which
service is at fault and in the meantime customers will blame Windows.

~~~
CephalopodMD
It's probably this. For any "open standard" there's going to be a few
different interpretations of what that means across the board. Different
services often have sightly different ideas about how their APIs should work,
which causes weird edge cases. Supporting all clients arbitrarily without
first making sure they all work is a headache for devs and is likely to result
in crashes/data loss/etc.

I'm guessing that the client was never designed to be a fully fleshed out
classic email app. They probably have some baked in ease of use/set up
features that they had to explicitly included on a per provider basis. Having
a list of pre-approved clients that are guaranteed to work probably satisfies
the grand majority of users while leaving these features maintainable.

------
leeter
It would be interesting to run CalDav and CardDav compliance tests against all
the providers and see who's actually compliant. This seems like a "We don't
want to deal with someone wondering why their ______ service won't work even
though it's returning a completely invalid response" decision.

------
acd
Windows could have had a proper update system that security updates all
software not just Microsoft products. Instead we got the Windows store updates
which is a strange in that normal Windows programs do not get security
patched.

In the future I think Windows will be a paid compatibility layer in Linux.
Building on SQL server libraries for Linux could be a start for such a
compatibility layer. Cloud and web apps has made Windows desktop more
irrelevant.

Most likely there will be an Linux desktop alliance between for example
Ubuntu, Amazon, Steam and PC makers that will make the Linux desktop more user
friendly.

~~~
Nuzzerino
Ubuntu has gotten less user-friendly over the years. Out of the handful of
distros I use, it is the only one that gives me frequent crashes with the
various widgets that come with the distro's default desktop environment.

Configuration tooling is also convoluted and buggy, as they build on top of
existing configuration tooling, so now there are more points of failure. And
the software repositories are often multiple versions behind the latest stable
release.

Ubuntu is doing great things for Microsoft.

------
d2wa
Why settle for promoting support for open protocols and standards when you
have the power to pick winners and losers in the market?

------
Nuzzerino
How is this any different from Google arbitrarily deranking/delisting search
results, or YouTube arbitrarily demonetizing videos?

~~~
rickycook
in those cases, people are also rightfully annoyed, but you can’t tackle all
the worlds problems in a single blog post

------
merb
What would be a worse headline?

Something like that probably:

> Sniggering Linux users who believe in open code and open standards can take
> a hike. The Online Accounts systems in GNOME, Ubuntu Unity, Plasma, and MATE
> do the exact same thing as Window 10

ouch. but to be fair you can configure carddav/caldav manually on linux (but
well I didn't liked evolution so much, mutt is okish but only for text. well
mac mail.app is worse since it can't send csv files correctly (it adds
unnecessary lines into it depending on the encoding)) (and well gnome only
supports 3 email providers with cal/contact sync in their boxes which is
microsoft, google and exchange (you can also add generic smtp/imap of course
but it's about caldav/carddav), and one can prolly use nextcloud for
carddav/caldav sync which is supported in the box aswell)

~~~
LeoPanthera
The GNOME accounts panel allows the addition of arbitrary CalDAV, CardDAV,
IMAP, SMTP accounts.

Also worth pointing out that iOS and macOS also do, too.

~~~
merb
where? [https://imgur.com/a/apKjy](https://imgur.com/a/apKjy) (ubuntu latest,
I also have a fedora but I only have the machine remotly which I can't access
at the moment, but I'm 100% sure that is has no way to setup caldav/carddav
directly inside the accounts panel)

~~~
Xylakant
I can confirm that at least Fedora 26 cannot. You have to go via evolution.

------
kokey
After spending a rather long time without Windows and Outlook I've recently
been using the current version of the desktop and web client. It's quite
functional and the workflow and features work intuitively and it actually
looks nice but the font sizes and layout really bother me. Having used a Mac
for very long the font rendering of Outlook on Windows makes it even worse for
me. I find it more work to read and identify what to read. I have noticed a
certain number of individuals at my previous workplace often missed some
e-mails and thinking about it made me remember that they Windows Outlook users
and where I work now a lot of people simply don't seem to read their e-mails
and everyone is using Outlook on Windows.

------
megaman22
This is their junky Windows Store mail app, right? I'm an Outlook jockey, so
it's been a while since I've tried to use that - primarily because it wasn't
all that usable.

I've been guilty of it in the past, but you gotta love some good armchair
programming (from the OP):

> In my estimate Microsoft, it’s just a matter of changing about six variables
> in the code and adding some text strings!

------
ghostbust555
But, you can? If you open the mail app and choose add account pop3/imap is an
option. What is this guy smoking?

~~~
d2wa
The article is about the CalDAV and CardDAV protocols which is the IMAP
equivalent for syncing your calendars and contacts.

~~~
drdaeman
So the article incorrectly titled as it uses word "email" while W10 does
support arbitrary POP/IMAP/SMTP mail systems.

------
alexkavon
This blog post uses a work around featured in another blog post on the net. I
filed a bug for this a while ago (after discovering said post) on their
Feedback app, several times. I'd really love to believe in Microsoft and their
push for UWP and a better ecosystem but their priorities aren't on functioning
and featureful software but instead only appearing they are building
functioning and featureful software.

------
reaperducer
It took a long time, but this is one of the things that Apple seems to have
finally gotten the hang of.

iCloud sync of to-do lists, notes, contacts, calendar, and Handoff between 6
computers and iDevices is a big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem.

It wasn't always reliable, and the first few years were particularly rough,
but it's been working flawlessly for me for the last couple of years.

Naturally, there are other people for whom things are not so smooth.

~~~
mr_toad
Hand-off of phone phone calls and copy & paste between devices impressed me
the most.

~~~
reaperducer
Every now and again I'll forget my phone in the car. I only find out about it
when an incoming phone call starts ringing on my Mac.

------
wilhil
One thing that I actually hate on Windows 10 compared to Windows 8 is the
native apps - it is a huge step backwards.

I have a Microsoft Account on my work (Office 365) email address.

Windows 8 worked perfectly - if you signed in to Windows with a MS account, it
would ask you "do you want to use your personal or organisation account" and
then you could add your email account with the same message.

Windows 10 on the other hand just errors out...

[https://superuser.com/q/1267281/4386](https://superuser.com/q/1267281/4386)

This is most annoying because Outlook does update the "system" calendar or the
home screen, you get none of the rich integrations. Cortana just errors out
whenever you try to interact with the calendar.

What's funny is, I can use my Office 365 account on my Mac without problems
and use Siri to make appointments, get notifications when to leave etc.

------
jasonkostempski
I tried using the Mail app for my work Office 365 email account because the
web UI is so awful. Turned out the app is pretty much exactly the same. Bulk
operations, except deleting (the one bulk operation I never wanted), are
pretty much impossible to do; simple UI features, like copy/paste are broken
in several ways; search is close to useless; annoying extra "features" I have
to turn off ("@" replies, chat). Any benefit OS integration provides is
completely negated, and then some, by all the other inconveniences of the app.

------
Digital-Citizen
The article says:

"Sniggering Linux users who believe in open code and open standards can take a
hike. The Online Accounts systems in GNOME, Ubuntu Unity, Plasma, and MATE do
the exact same thing as Window 10. There are underlying CalDAV and CardDAV
sync engines (Evolution Data Server, Akonadi) that power them but the user
interface only expose two–three providers like Google and Yahoo! with no
option to auto-discover or manually configure any other providers."

I think this takes a needlessly limited view by casting the limits imposed on
users of nonfree software onto free software (which is odd because elsewhere
the author says they love free software). Here's the overlooked difference:
with a free software program, one can improve the code to add the desired
functionality and interoperability. Users can even get together and
collectively fund a programmer to help them out. By contrast, Microsoft
Windows 10 Email app is nonfree (proprietary, user-subjugating). Even
technically capable and willing users are prohibited from reading the relevant
source code, modifying it, and distributing it to help others. Even if
Microsoft alters their code to add missing functionality, users likely gain no
software freedom in the process. Users aren't allowed to inspect and rebuild
the software. Software freedom leads to trusting that software and proprietary
software is often malware ([https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-
microsoft.html](https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html) for
pointers to how Microsoft's software is often malware). Software freedom is
the key to understanding the difference.

This limitation has nothing to do with GNU/Linux systems (unfairly referred to
as "Linux" in the article; see [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-
avoid.html#Linux](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Linux)
for more on this) per se; software can be ported to other OSes and the desired
features could be available there too.

Standards that allow interoperability are a good unto themselves, just like
software freedom, and we should push for both, use both, and improve both to
meet our needs, not "take a hike" as the author suggests.

With software freedom users don't have to beg a software proprietor (who is
also a known NSA collaborator and multinational antitrust violator) to make
the software more interoperable. They can help themselves, they can hire
someone to help, they can ask the community (perhaps in more kind words than
the article) to help. These are potent options that render the software
trustworthy (regardless of who wrote it) and with sufficient improvement even
cross-platform.

------
chris_wot
Is there Gnome integration for CalDAV, out of interest? I’m always interested
in knowing how Gnome and KDE fairs against Windows.

~~~
d2wa
It’s mentioned in the article. GNOME (and KDE) supports it, but has the same
problem as Windows where they only let you configure it from major branded
providers. You can open Evolution, configure it there, and have it work
globally in all GNOME apps, but this is poorly documented.

------
Havoc
Don't want Windows near my mails / contacts / cal anyway.

Windows serves three purposes for me:

1) Launch browser

2) Launch VLC

3) Launch Steam

~~~
swirepe
4\. launch eclipse at 9am

5\. close eclipse at 5pm

~~~
LeifCarrotson
s/eclipse/Visual Studio/

Or Solidworks, Quickbooks, Photoshop or whatever it is you do between 9 and 5.

~~~
megaman22
I try my best never to close Visual Studio... some of the solutions I work on
are so painful to reload. Double-click the sln, ho to the bathroom, get a cup
of coffee, come back, and it's still thrashing disk and locked up. Much better
to keep everything warm.

