Looks like sometime early next year, Microsoft will cheerfully degrade my email experience by force, by removing the ability to retain “Classic Outlook.”
This is obnoxious and infuriating, but I’m trying to adapt. However, they’ve made it very difficult to figure out what I can do to cobble together the features I want out of what they’re going to force me into, partially because of their way of describing every degradation as an improvement (“Now you will no longer have the problem of having to request fishing hooks be embedded in your skin - MSHookEmbed™ will automatically take care of that for you (OptOut feature to be provided at some time in the 2040s)”)
What I want is the ability to automatically save emails to localdisconnected storage. I currently do that with PST files and rules, but PST files are probably going away (with some sign that I’ll be able to access my current PSTs read-only). I don’t want what MSN calls “offline” access which is just a local copy that is updated to match the server version whenever my system is connected to the web - I want a real backup, so if I delete or reararrange on the server, the backup is unaffected.
Is there, will there be, can there be, such an arrangement? What alternatives are there to Outlook that do have this ability?
I’m in the same boat. I have not yet seen any ultimatum from MSFT that classic is going away for me. Thanks for the heads-up
I want / need PSTs. Or the functional equivalent. And I want RSS feeds delivered to my Outlook or Outlook-equivalent PC app as well. Both features are absent from the new flavor. Which is why I’ve stuck w the old one so far.
I’ve not researched alternatives. But I’ll start that process & share what I’ve learned as I do so.
Add me to the club. In the past, I have used Mozilla Thunderbird as an alternative (and it is what I use on the Linux box that I rarely actually use). I didn’t get the notice about the demise of Outlook Classic either, but I get I’m going to start now in migrating to Thunderbird. In my use case, I have a PST file that I use to aggregate the emails I might need to have offline. I usually do this once a year by copying the online items to the PST file. I don’t have to access it often, but it is useful when I do. Last year my ex-wife claimed I owed her several thousand dollars and to prove that I already paid it I needed to resurrect a 10 year old email chain. I’ve always been pretty anal about keeping my email organized into folders, but sometimes this comes in handy.
It took me an hour to install and configure all my accounts in Thunderbird, so pretty painless. Make sure to install the Lightning Add-on for calendars. I have to say that I actually like the layout and the way Thunderbird handles calendars and contacts better than Outlook Classic (i.e. the Today pane in Thunderbird combines all my calendars, which is something Outlook cannot do). I think the main reason I stopped using it was because my work account won’t allow access from Thunderbird, so I consolidated everything into Outlook Classic. I may switch to the web interface for my work account and just use Thunderbird for everything else.
After a little deeper dive I should note that Thunderbird does not support PST files natively, but there are several ways of importing them into Thunderbird. Here is the Copilot summary:
Not that it’s any consolation but Yahoo recently ruined what was a perfectly functional mail program as well.
I too have been gradually moving to Thunderbird. Gradually because I’m now using my own domain for mail but will need to keep Yahoo alive since I’ve had it for years - one never knows when a long forgotten contact may get in touch.
Where does Thunderbird get its calendars? Is it accessing info from Office 365, or is it some separate proprietary calendar stuff? Does it do tasks & repetitive tasks?
Point being I use an Android phone and although I don’t use Outlook for Android, all my mail, calendar items, contacts, and tasks are ultimately stored inside Microsoft’s live.com = outlook.com = Office 365 ecosystem and I’d need my PC-based email / etc. personal productivity app to CRUD all those things to/from there. Just as my various Android apps do.
I’d hate to have to switch to the Meta / Google ecosystem at this point. And it’s even more web/online-centric, not offline-centric. But I’m not interesting in cobbling together a complete life-management solution on two dissimilar hardware / OS platforms from some of this and some of that which are half-compatible with each other … for now.
Thunderbird can do a local calendar, but that is not what most people want. If you add your Office 365 account to Thunderbird it will be able to access your mail and calendar. This is what I do for my work email and calendar, and it is fine.
It does repeating events, but I don’t use any of the to-do or task manager features, so I can’t talk about those. They exist.
I also haven’t played with doing backups of local Thunderbird copies of mail, because I store all of my mail in the cloud, and it is backed up there. Thunderbird is the interface I use to access my mail, not to store my mail.
It has its own local offline calendar, but it can synchronize with ICS calendars. It seems that it will not let me edit my Outlook (M365 account), but that may have to do with the publishing settings in Outlook - I need to experiment with this some more. It works with my Gmail calendar (which I don’t use) and seems to work with my iCloud calendar - which I also don’t use, but I’m considering using it as a replacement for my Outlook calendar if I can’t get that working correctly. It also shows my work Outlook calendar, but just like my personal account it won’t let me edit. It may be that I need to set up a “Thundermail” account for Thunderbird and give that account permissions in my Outlook accounts to get that working correctly. Thundermail is a new feature, which I have not yet tried.
Unless Gemini dies a painful death, I will never succumb to that temptation. I’ve spent the last 2 years getting out of the Google ecosystem and I have no desire to go back to feed Gemini. I also dumped Android for an iPhone for the same reason. Not that the Apple and Microsoft ecosystems are any better, but neither Apple nor Microsoft are advertising companies - Alphabet is.
I agree wholeheartedly, and it remains a work in progress for me. Surprisingly, (and perhaps ironically) Apple seems to play much nicer with other platforms. Migrating to an iPhone was much less painful than I thought it would be. Going forward, I’m going to run Thunderbird and Outlook Classic side by side. I’ll update this thread with what I learn. If it works out maybe I’ll start using my Linux PCs more.
Thunderbird used to have an add-on for local backups. It may have been replaced or updated - I haven’t dug into it yet, but it’s on my to-do list. At the very least, I will be copying my Local Files in Thunderbird to an external backup. It should be possible to automate that, but I will see.
The box stock Samsung calendar app on my Android will create, read, and display Office 365 calendar items. But it won’t edit them except for a brief interval after they’re created on the phone but before they’ve synced to the cloud.
Which suggests to me there’s some way in which MSFT is not playing nice with some standard. OTOH, the calendar app doesn’t even offer the [edit] button in its UI. Suggesting instead it’s a deliberate decision by Samsung not to support that. Perhaps they needed to pay some royalty amounting to 10 cents per phone per year. And they balked at the vast imposition on their profits.
When the new outlook came out I tried it. I hated it, for reasons I don’t even recall anymore. When I toggled back, I got some kind of survey asking me why. I told them my reasons, and that the original outlook was perfectly fine. I’ve never tried it again and don’t want to. This is very disturbing news. Any way the internet can rise up as one and stop this?
I think my issue using Outlook calendars in Tbird is that it isn’t using my account to authenticate. If I mark an appointment as Private in Outlook, it shows up as a Private Event in Tbird. That tells me MS isn’t reading any authentication when it synchs. That may be caused by a setting I haven’t found yet on one end or the other.
If you can create events in your Samsung calendar, that means it’s authenticating with 365. The absence of an edit button sounds like something in the Samsung software, which may well be for the reason you postulated.
So far, it’s looking like using Outlook calendars in Tbird is read-only. There is an add-on for Outlook calendars, but it’s just a tab that opens the web client for Outlook (which seems pointless if you have a browser installed like everyone on the planet). I’m sure it used to work, so I feel like this is a new Microsoft thing - i.e. when I Publish a calendar in Outlook I can no longer create a link with Edit permissions. You can only do that when sharing a calendar with an email address. I’m hopeful there is a way around this that I haven’t found yet. Nevertheless I’ve exported my calendar items to my iCloud calendar, which I can edit in Tbird.
On the backup front I have better news. There is an extension called ImportExportTools NG that allows you to run backups of everything and Export stuff to MBOX files.
Would it be worth considering separating the concerns instead of trying to find one program to do both? i.e.
Pick an email client based on whatever feels best for normal, everyday use, including good calendar sync for your ecosystem of choice
Use a separate solution for backup onto local storage — it just has to be compatible with your email system, not necessarily replace it. It can live side by side with the regular email client
There are separate archival programs like e.g. MailStore Home – Free Email Archiving for Home Users – MailStore – The Standard in Email Archiving that ingests email from various sorces (PST, EML files, current Outlook or Office 365, or any IMAP connection) and stores them in its own offline backup, but with built-in search and the ability to re-export back to Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever. It’s a proper separate backup that doesn’t depend on Microsoft’s whims, while also not moving you to any other ecosystem. On one hand, it’s slightly more hassle than having the backups in your email client, but on the other hand it’s also a proper separate backup and safe from accidental deletions and such.
I haven’t used that particular one, but there’s a few similar options out there, or you can get AI to write you a personal backup utility to your spec.
If you don’t mind paying, there are also third-party email + calendar clients like https://www.emclient.com/ with auto-backups and RSS support too. It says it supports Outlook and Exchange. It can also write to those calendars, it looks like, but maybe with some setup.
I have to change what I said. Outlook calendars do NOT work seamlessly on Thunderbird.
I was confused because my Outlook calendar is on my Thunderbird on my work desktop. I don’t use the calendar for much, but meetings get added to it, and I can see them in Thunderbird. I must have subscribed to the read-only version of the calendar at some time.
It looks like two-way sync between Thunderbird and Outlook/Exchange calendars is not simple. There appear to be three options:
Wait for Thunderbird to add calendar support to the Microsoft Graph api access for Exchange.
Use a beta version of Tbsync that does not yet support the newest release of Thunderbird (159), but does support the extended support release (153).
M365 Calendar github native version can add an Outlook calendar as a native Thunderbird calendar, but it probably also only works on 153. It also does not include Entra client or tenant IDs (translation: it does not work out of the box).
Probably the best is to use Tbsync off github with Thunderbird 153. I’ve not tried it.
Also, I’ve not tried adding the Outlook calendar on Android. From what I read, if I install Outlook on Android, then I can get the Outlook calendar loaded as a native Android calendar.
Thanks everyone for the information and suggestions. I’m feeling a bit more hopeful than I was this morning; it seems like there are some workable solutions to my issues after all. I may ask for more information on how to implement some, but right now I just want to say how much I appreciate all your help
Classic Outlook will be supported through at least 2029 (search, you’ll find it). So plan to die by then: problem solved!
(That’s my strategy, anyway.)
There’s a lot of stuff they’d need to do to get corporate users to switch. So either they’re working on that or just hoping somehow folks will succumb.
Thank you. So quite a bit further out, and time for MSN to improve their new Outlook (and perhaps add the features I’m wanting) or for me to figure out what to switch to. Sorry for the false alarm.