Transcript
Paul Thurott (0:00)
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at the most reviled new Windows app in years, the new Outlook. It's not as bad as you think it is.
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Paul Thurott (0:20)
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to take a look at the new Outlook. Don't go away yet. Hold on. I know a lot of people don't like it, but actually I think it looks pretty great. In fact, I think this is going to be an excellent upgrade for everybody eventually. There's a schedule here. So in Windows 11, Microsoft has just replaced the old Mail and Calendar apps with the new Outlook app that happened as of the end of 2024. They are going to replace the old Outlook, classic Outlook, in the classic Microsoft Office desktop suite for Window. But that's going to take years and for businesses in particular, they're going to have several years before they have to make that transition. Microsoft wants to make sure that this app includes all the features that people expect. I would say as of now, though, for individuals, especially if you're using this with a consumer account, you know, Gmail or Outlook.com or whatever, it's there. It's already a fantastic app and I don't quite understand what all the angst and hate is about, but I thought we should take a look at it and you can see it for yourself. So I think it's mostly good news. So when you first run this app in Windows 11, if you sign in with a Microsoft account or a Microsoft work or school account, it will ask you to auto configure that account. I'm just going to bring up the account UI here. This isn't what that actually looks like, but it also gives you the opportunity to go in afterwards and say, well, I also have this account or this account. It supports all kinds of different accounts. So obviously all the Microsoft accounts, consumer and commercial, all the Google stuff, consumer and commercial. So Paul.com here it says Gmail, but it's actually a Google Workspace account. This one is obviously a Gmail account. This is an Outlook.com account that dates back to Hotmail from 2002, I believe. And it is attached to a paid Microsoft 365 family account, which is important actually, which we'll get to in one moment. You can also attach it to Apple accounts. So if you have an Apple ID with iCloud and you have, you know, mail, calendar, whatever, you can Attach that as well. And it supports other accounts through legacy protocols like imap. So if you have a Yahoo account, it only does email in that case. And it's imap, which isn't great. But any of these modern accounts, Apple, Google, Microsoft, should work fine. But there is one asterisk on that. If you do not pay for Microsoft 365 and that could be consumer or commercial, right through work, you will see ads in the app. I don't think that they're all that egregious. I can't show it to you because I do pay for it. But the big one appears here at the top of the message list and it looks like an email, which is a little gross, but when you click on it, it goes to the web and whatever. So I think it's the type of thing you would get used to. But then again, I think the type of people that would use this app in the first place are going to be kind of in the Microsoft ecosystem and probably paying at least for some basic form of Microsoft 365. So it's not that onerous for most people, but it's just something to know about. The other one to know about is that when you bring in a third party account, meaning a non Microsoft account, in order to get all of the features of Outlook, you actually have to sync your credentials through Microsoft servers in the cloud. Now this has raised a lot of privacy concerns with people worried that Microsoft is looking at your credentials or something. That's not what's happening. If you know anything about Outlook or Microsoft's email solutions going back just about 25 years now, you probably know that they support all kinds of unique features. Today we have things like Focused Inbox, for example, or Flags, which are kind of unique to the Microsoft space, or the ability to pin emails or assign categories, all these kind of things. So these are kind of classic Outlook functions that Microsoft has to bring into the app for business users, but anyone can use them. They don't work with Gmail, they don't work with Apple, they don't work with Yahoo, et cetera. So by storing your credentials in Microsoft's cloud, you actually get to use all those features. And you can mix and match all your accounts together into one unified view. And they all work exactly the same way. It's easier for Microsoft than having multiple account types, all of which have like some matrix of features, you know, and it's driving some people crazy because they're like, well, I don't, I don't want to say my credentials in Microsoft's cloud server and great. Well then just don't use. Oh look, there you go. Problem solved. So I think the type of people that are going to use this trust Microsoft, at least for this kind of thing. I do for sure. I mean, there are certain things I don't like about Microsoft, but I'm not worried about this kind of thing. So I think that's fine.