Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails!
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quote: TL;DR If you are using the Outlook 2016 to download from a POP3 server, you should disable automatic updates and/or downgrade to a previous version or else your emails are likely to be deleted almost immediately. source
wow!
UPDATE 02/26/2016:
New and helpful Microsoft Knowledge Base Article here…
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3145116TL;DR: Disable automatic updates in File->Office Account->Update Options and then downgrade by entering this at a command prompt
"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft shared\ClickToRun\officec2rclient.exe" /update user updatetoversion=16.0.6366.2068
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... who's using POP3 in 2016?
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Apparently not Outlook testers.
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Me.
It's handy if your ISP mailbox still charge you money when your mailbox size exceeds quota. Just use POP3 to download everything and empty it afterwards.
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You can do that with IMAP.
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In fact, I just checked that the instruction they provided on their website just mentioned how to setup for POP3 only, nothing is mentioned for IMAP so I'm not even sure whether IMAP is supported or not.
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Yeah, a lot of terrible ISPs only provide POP3 access.
Also, POP3 is, IMO, a lot less likely to bog down with big inboxes - I had that issue when using IMAP with Gmail.
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Also, POP3 is, IMO, a lot less likely to bog down with big inboxes
I guess that's the reason why they want people use POP3 only.HKBN is not a terrible ISP, in fact it's the first ISP which provides fibre connection directly to home for their BB1000 plan. (I choose BB100 only, though because that theoretical increase in network speed has not much use when your most network traffics targets overseas.)
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I guess I should've worded that differently...
There are lots of ISPs that are terrible at IT in general, and at setting up email in particular, that only enable POP3.
Because I have yet to see an ISP in the flesh that doesn't reak of WTF. (With the sole possible exception of Google Fiber, although they don't exist yet where I live)
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. who's using POP3 in 2016?
who is using Outlook in 2016?
What is wrong with web clients.
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You can do that with IMAP
POP3 has fewer knobs to twiddle. If all you want to do is move mails from a mailbox to somewhere else, POP3 is usually the easiest way to get that done. I agree with your implied assertion that it's completely the wrong tool for any use case more complicated than that.
In particular, the bug reported in the OP appears to be triggered by setting up the POP3 client in such a way that it is not supposed to delete mailbox messages immediately after fetching them. The message ID stuff required to make this at all practicable has always been fragile as hell - so much so that complaining about it going wrong is pretty much in the "Doctor, it hurts when I stab myself in the face with POP3" territory.
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I'm confused, I thought that with POP your email was deleted from the server and stored locally anyway? Or is that something else?
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@blakeyrat said:
. who's using POP3 in 2016?
who is using Outlook in 2016?
What is wrong with web clients.
Who is using new Microsoft products?
What is wrong with Outlook 2010.
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I thought that with POP your email was deleted from the server and stored locally anyway?
Except when you check the box "leave mail on server" or equivalent.
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I thought that with POP your email was deleted from the server and stored locally anyway?
It is if you're using POP3 sanely.
However, POP3's list-available-messages, fetch-message and delete-message operations are all separate, so it's possible for POP3 clients to fetch mails and then not delete them. They will generally do this if you turn on "leave mails on server" or similar.
Making this work requires the client to keep a list of the POP3 message IDs it has already collected from any given server, so it knows not to fetch those messages again after the next time it asks that server what's on it. It also requires the server to use consistent message IDs forever. Both of these things occasionally go wrong.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
What is wrong with Outlook 2010.
I was happy to move to Office 2013 simply for the fact that Excel is no longer a single window MDI.
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Since you ask that, you never used Outlook WebAccess
This? Or is there something even worse?
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POP3 might be obsolete, but that doesn't justify a data loss bug.
Support or support not, there is no try.
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Yes, that's how the protocol was designed, back in 1988 when people still stored email in their computers.
Of course, some things have changed in these 28 years. People no longer use teletypewriters to access mainframes, you can't trust random computers on the internet, and mail providers give you at least 15GB of storage space in their servers for free.
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Since you ask that, you never used Outlook WebAccess
... which is bad because...?
I prefer it to Gmail's shitty interface. Not enough to switch mail providers alas.
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It's better than Lotus Notes, alright?
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Because it sucks !
You get a non-functional "light" version when you use Chrome on Linux, no mater what version you have.
Yahoo mail in 2000 was better than this POS.They support the full version on Windows with Chrome v.3.0.195.27. I have Chrome v. 48, so maybe they should realize we are in 2016, Chrome v.3 came out in 2009 ! Beside, Chrome on Linux is not different than the Windows version.
When I switch my user agent to make it believe I have Explorer, then I get the full version. It sucks a bit less.
Oh, and I like Gmails interface, so to each his own.
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There's two players in your little game, and I believe the one who sucks is Linux.
Look at it this way: Linux sucks so much that it pulls down the otherwise-great Outlook web interface down to its level.
Anglelyne: Bender! You tricked me!
Bender: That's right baby, I ain't your loverboy Flexo, the guy you love so much. You even love anyone pretending to be him.
Anglelyne: Well maybe I love you so much that I love you no matter who you're pretending to be.
Bender: Oh, how I wish I could believe or understand that!
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@dse said:
What is wrong with web clients.
Since you ask that, you never used Outlook WebAccess
I used to use Thunderbird a lot because every web client I'd ever used found some way to give me the shits. So far, Fastmail's has not; I use it almost exclusively.
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Explain why the user-agent trick works, and why OWA still behaves normally then?
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The explanation is: I don't give a shit.
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OK.
Want a ?
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@Lorne_Kates said:
What is wrong with Outlook 2010.
I was happy to move to Office 2013 simply for the fact that Excel is no longer a single window MDI.
Hey, it only took 3 years, but someone was finally able to name a single useful new feature of Office 2013.
Doesn't balance out the 9562342 other useless Metro anti-features, but still, there's at least one.
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I guess I'm not sure what makes you think Office 2013 has a "Metro" interface. Office has consistently had a significantly different interface than Windows since 1995. They've had their own UI design team at least that long. 2013 seems like a direct improvement over Office 2010 to me, and the ribbon interface has been markedly improved since 2007. The only irritating thing I find about 2013 in general is that it defaults to SharePoint as the top priority save location.
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The only irritating thing I find about 2013 in general is that it defaults to SharePoint as the top priority save location.
If you go into Options in Word and go to the Save section, there should be a couple of options, specifically Show additional places for saving, even if sign-in may be required and Save to Computer by default, that may be of interest to you.
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Thanks for that. I'd been trying to work out why my wife was suddenly seeing duplicate messages in Outlook, the KB you linked (which didn't exist when I was looking) explains it.
who's using POP3 in 2016?
I switched her account from IMAP to POP3 to stop Outlook using an alarming proportion of our bandwidth quota. I don't know if this is still a problem with the latest version of Outlook.
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I switched her account from IMAP to POP3 to stop Outlook using an alarming proportion of our bandwidth quota.
I think you would have been better off switching from Outlook to Thunderbird to stop IMAP using an alarming proportion of your bandwidth quota.
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Since you ask that, you never used Outlook WebAccess
We use GMail at work (business version) and it is much better than any mail client I have ever used, just keep one tab open. Even desktop notifications work fine and integrates seamlessly with GDrive and GDocs.
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Gmail hate inbound in 3.... 2..... 1........
(I personally use it myself too. I'd use a desktop client, but Thunderbird is fugly and Outlook is slow as hell. Plus it integrates nicely with everything else I own too (Android phones, etc).)
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Thunderbird
Bad old days.
Outlook
Not bad but why? What problem does it solve. It used to be better for searching and categories and meetings and schedules, but Gmail does all that much better (who searches better than Google?) that plus it integrates with Android and iOS and GDocs,... I have personal GMail and business GMail and in the app I can ask it to give me a unified view.
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Yep. And (unlike some here) I'm actually OK with the web interface. I do wish there was an equivalent desktop client for it though... I do like the native app feel.....
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I don't hate GMail because I don't use it.
Likewise I don't hate Hotmail, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
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Thunderbird is fugly and Outlook is slow as hell
I'm quite happy with KMail now:
Apparently there's a Windows version here, though I have no idea how well it works or how potentially ugly it is.
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I don't know ... it looks all blurry ...
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Every Office version I've tried was slightly better than the previous one.
$500 worth of better? Definitely not.
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Oh, I agree with you there. I wouldn't upgrade Office 2000 to 2003, or 2003 to 2007. But 2000 to 2010? Or 2003 to 2013? Yeah, I'd do that.
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I guess I'm not sure what makes you think Office 2013 has a "Metro" interface.
Giant icons. Everything useful hidden behind many clicks. Designed (and failed) to work on a tablet instead of the monitor it's on. Screen real-estate given to social shit and whitespace? Metro.
Here's a sample of how 2013 fucked up productivity in a productivity suite for the sake of broken UI. Excel and Word are covered. I never got screenshots of Outlook 2013, because I had to uninstall it so I could do actual work:
I'm sure they're just jizzing to get the desktop version to (not) work just like the Outlook.com web version:
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If you go into Options in Word and go to the Save section, there should be a couple of options, specifically Show additional places for saving, even if sign-in may be required and Save to Computer by default, that may be of interest to you.
You know, I never thought to even check to see if there were options for that. Thanks!
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I think you would have been better off switching from Outlook to Thunderbird to stop IMAP using an alarming proportion of your bandwidth quota.
Is that because, having already trained my wife to use Outlook, training her to use Thunderbird - a program I have no experience with - and figuring out how to get her old emails migrated, etc. would have been even more fun? Because I'm pretty sure it would have been a lot more effort than just changing the account type to POP3.
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In my experience, anything that isn't Outlook is more fun than Outlook. So, yes.
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In my experience, anything that isn't Outlook is more fun than Outlook.
Have you never heard of Access?In any case, it wouldn't be me that was using it, so the fun I could get from it would be limited to downloading it, installing it, learning to use it, and then teaching my wife to use it. Of those, only the third step seems likely to contain any fun at all, and I'd much rather just make the settings change in Outlook.
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