Comment by dewey
2 years ago
I thought that's what every email provider does? Fastmail has the same feature where you can provide your credentials and they'll fetch the emails from other providers for you.
2 years ago
I thought that's what every email provider does? Fastmail has the same feature where you can provide your credentials and they'll fetch the emails from other providers for you.
If I instruct fastmail or another provider to fetch mail from a different email provider on my behalf so that I have it in one place then that is a deliberate decision I make. If I connect to my mail provider via IMAP/SMTP from a local application (Outlook, Thunderbird, mutt or whatever) I do not expect my credentials to be exfiltrated to a third party so that they can also fetch my mail. In fact, I would consider that to be criminal behavior if not VERY clearly communicated, with all it's implications.
Many webmail services offer this, but the difference is that the Windows program is a local program, not a cloud service.
The Outlook app for Android does the exact same thing, copying your email to the Microsoft cloud and then serving the emails to your phone from Microsoft's servers.
> Many webmail services offer this, but the difference is that the Windows program is a local program, not a cloud service.
Is it really? The comments on the original Heise article mention that Heise actually misunderstood it and it's basically just a link to the web interface in the task bar so it's not a local app.
I can't see any indication that it's actually a web interface in Microsoft's announcement.
Looking at the Microsoft Store entry (https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/outlook-for-windows/9NRX63...) I don't really see any indication of it being a web app either.
Maybe they're hiding their web app Electron/Tauri style, but I would certainly expect it to be local-only based on the way it's advertised and designed.
The difference here seems to be transparency.