Outlook.com is still not functioning properly for some Microsoft punters Microsoft is still working to resolve "difficulties" faced by its Outlook customers, despite months of complaints about the disappearance of sent emails and 550 Errors. A growing number of complaints threads have been posted to Microsoft's questions page regarding Outlook after recent upgrades to the service. They both precede …
I think you should change it a little to 5050 - as in so-so since that seems to be as good as it gets from someone claiming to be a cloud leader, which is telling on its own.
You would hope that they would be able to follow their own design guidelines and come up with something half decent with some form of reasonable availability, after all, each successive outage of their service undermines their cloud offering..
why does this *NOT* surprise me???
There's the RIGHT way, the WRONG way, and the MICRO-SHAFT way. Looks like 'Virus Outbreak' uses the 3rd option. no surprise here.
I still haven't seen a REALLY good explanation as to what (exactly) motivates people to use Virus Outbreak (aka MS Outlook). One person replied in another thread, saying how it integrates things like contact info with everything else. I just don't see it, because I'm not a sales/marketing/management/support droid that's on the phone all of the time. In fact, I don't even ANSWER the phone. I turn the ringer off and occasionally check the answering machine. Phones are DISRUPTIONS and my train of thought is too important to be disrupted. So why would I *EVAR* need a 'Virus Outbreak' to 'integrate' all of that? Exactly!
I expect software devs (in general) are more like ME than are like someone who actually USES something "like Virus Outbreak" and so Micro-shaft continues to have their niche that's big enough to keep them viable... with *NO* FOSS devs capable of even SEEING THE NEED for something to REPLACE it.
[those who understand the needs of Virus Outbreak are apparently unable to write a replacement for it; those who ARE capable, do not see nor understand the need.]
I mentioned this after the last article, and that's the surprisingly long time it takes MS to actually fix an issue for all users. Seems like they can bork things overnight with a massive upgrade, but pushing out fixes for regression issues take weeks using some slow, serial process that will suck a lot if you are at the end of the line for the update.
Makes you really wonder at what point does the scale become unmanageable - not from a "we know how to do this big", but from a "it takes a really long time to fix hundreds of thousands of instances" perspective.
Maybe we're already there.
There I am, being a M$ partner and being buggered at least 3x a week, to sell Office 360,5 to my customers.
Sorry, but as an IT Consultant and (Cloud) Service Provider, I always thought it should be my main goal, to help my customers maintain a stable, functioning and secure IT infrastructure.
There once was a time, where M$ pledged they'd help me with that...
Yes, I know. That was somewhere before the year 2000...
Oh well, on the bright side:
F*ck ups like this will eventually lead to the usage of better suited alternatives, that cost less, use less resources and provide the same or even a better service...
Thanks M$, for doing my business for me!
I used to use Bluebottle, and after they went away I switched to fastmail.com.
They have a nice web interface if you want to use it. I use Maildroid on my phone with IMAP, and Thunderbird at home with a POP3 mailbox. It just works.
Have never had a problem with fastmail. I very rarely had short-term problems with Bluebottle, over several years.
Give MS 3 more months, they'll solve the problem. Give another 1.5 year for tiny problems that'll be found in the meantime. This is MS policy since last 2 years. The whole MS industry is affected by this disease. Only Windows "security patch" and "buggy feature and stupid change" department still working at tolerable speed.
After months of facing an outlook.com login screen that could not progress beyond the "select your timezone" stage, finally today it let me in.
Even more ironically, the Office 360 trail period, whence this Outlook account spawned, has now expired.
Microsoft's incompetence is simply epic.
The curse of El Reg seems to have prodded MS into rolling out a fix to the RFC 2822 Date Header thing. Hooray.
However, Outlook still won't save "Sent Items" from connected accounts. It is a little disingenuous for Redmond to claim "a very small percentage" affected as it seems to be affecting EVERY Connected Account user. Or does Microsoft think 100% is a very small percentage?
I started having the same problem as everyone else with connected accounts - mail either not going or getting stuck in drafts....
Try:
1) Delete the connection to the external account causing the problem
2) Start recreating but do not put the correct information for email address/password
3) Outlook.com then says it can't connect and gives you the option of PO3 or IMAP
4) Select POP3 and enter details manually for the account to be connected
5) Eh Voila! All is now working again - well it is for me anyway!
Try it and report back. May well work but if it doesn't wasn't me that found the solution :)
I'm just grateful that I can finally send emails with only one date header and save a copy!!
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