> People treat email has a permanent data store.

Is this strange?

I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.

This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?

>and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.

It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.

Pretty much any app that's been around a while will have all kinds of advanced features that the average user will never use, and eventually becomes detrimental. Hence there's always a group of users and product managers asking to rewrite the app to focus on "the basics".

There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.

A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.

Outlook COM addons + AutoHotKey was one of the ways that I learned programming back in the day. Email arrives > check the sender > if sender is $company > check for keywords and then run excel macros based on that > generate PDF report and automatically generate an outlook email, attach and send the file.

Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.

Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.

When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.

More like email became stripped down and no longer what it was. Mailboxes were always a permanent data store, there were mail files on disk.

Funny enough, COM is still the fastest way to read calendar data.

A self sorting shield against to much information if you are at the hub of some organization..

Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.

If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.

> People treat email has a permanent data store.

Email the protocol has this built in.

> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.

It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.

That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.

It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.

Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.

I literally switched on "Enable offline support", caching "All mail" offline on my iPhone a few months ago. Tons of free space, only using 4GB for offline.

But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.

The mobile client now supports viewing emails offline.

I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.

Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.

> Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email?

Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.

Google killed basic HTML in Gmail a few years ago

I have 16 GB of RAM on my laptop, and I'm told that's relatively little nowadays. Even after the OS's 2 GB cut, I can run 35 applications that use 400 MB each. I don't even have 35 applications that I care about. (and I'm certainly not going to want to run more than, say, three email clients)

RAM usage at that scale might not be desirable, but any engineer knows that it's the result of a tradeoff where the other options take longer to develop. I would rather have an application that uses 400 MB now than a slimmer one in several years, or one that uses less memory but is extremely slow in some corporate environments (like older Outlook).

(please don't respond to quibble about the napkin math)

Microsoft Schedule+ was Microsoft's workgroup calendaring app before the Office division merged email and calendar into one app.

Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release.

from https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_...

  I've been using Schedule+ 95 to keep track of my daily activities since forever. I even modified my Windows install to keep it fully compatible after WinHlp32 was nixed in Windows 10. However, it is increasingly showing its age, and there are certain aspects where I would prefer a more modern solution; I can't integrate Sched+ with my smart phone easily ...

  I'm explicitly NOT looking for any cloud or web apps. I don't have reliable internet nor are all of my daily use machines fast enough to reliably, and responsively, display 90% of the bloated webapps out there. I want something lean, fast, and native for the desktop. Schedule+ uses a max of about 7MB of RAM and I don't want to go over 10-20.

Windows NT/2k?

Active Directory and MS SQL Server are both solid products, as is .NET. The windows NT kernel is very well thought out, too. The last iteration of windows phone was quite good, if too little too late.

Don't get me wrong, MS will enshitify anything it can to make a quick buck. They're much like Disney in that regard.

Depending on if you have Microsoft365, you don't get ads either. It's not ads, it's fact that browsers are still not native performance to Win32 application. However, companies hate maintaining multiple applications (Win32/MacOS) and Sysadmin at companies hate maintaining Win32 Applications as well so everyone starts building WebView2.