We need reasonable expectations of our vendors. SmarterMail works with a whole bunch or protocols and a whole bunch of products. Microsoft is dropping a product that works well in a multi-vendor environment and replaced it with a product that only works well in a proprietary environment because Microsoft made undocumented and proprietary changes to the protocols for the purpose of intercepting client traffic. SmarterMail could attempt to reverse-engineer their code, at great expense. But even after doing so, they would be endlessly harrassed for the thousand little things that were not reverse-engineered perfectly.
If you have followed the complaints on this forum over the years, you know that problems can occur with time zones, character sets, languages, calendar sync, message sync, and client authentication. And whatever reverse-engineering works in New Outlook v1, it may be demolished in Outlook v2.
Does nobody asks why we needed a New Outlook that was not upward compatible with the widely-used original?
Does anybody ask if we need Outlook at all? I have Outlook 2021 available on my computer, but I use it very rarely. It is really good for sorting messages to finding old ones to be discarded. For everything else, I use webmail. This was not forced on me, it just happened naturally because webmail is very functional.
If clients want to contribute their data toward Microsoft's success in Generative AI, they should not be using SmarterMail. If they had any awareness of the exposed security holes in Office365, they would not be using that platform at all.
To my mind, New Outlook is inherently unethical.
End of rant.
Doug Foster
Doug