Like many people who are employed where you use email, my employer has forced the M365 multiverse on me. Some use google, some have smaller collections of separate tools, we have M365. “Deal with it”.

This has reduced my productivity immensely, and is a constant pain in the behind, at least for this employee.

Now, where do I begin. Ah, ok, email. Simple, isn’t it? Well, according to M365 we are too stupid to use email.

Outlook

Well, you’d think email is easy. But Outlook thinks users are stupid, this is why:

• you get a “warning” about not often getting email from new senders. Ok, well, I perfectly know that most of the email I get is from random co-workers or users. So why even mention that every one of those emails is from “somebody new”? This is just junk cluttering up my screen, and as we see later, it does something that should not be done with email, ever.
• you get “safelinks” to links mentioned in the email. For starters, those links are totally unreadable, so good luck spotting a malicious link with that kind of obfuscation. Next, even text that is not a link to begin with is converted into a link, a practice that Outlook should just stop with because it has only one purpose, to make a mail unsafe.
• the default quoting style is top-posting. It is by common consense the worst style of replying to an email, because you have to read the email from bottom to top to get the conversation in the right order. It is quite difficult to get a usable quoting style configured, and it breaks as soon as one of the people in the email chain decides to destroy a quoting thread by top-posting. Get rid of it, really!
• the email address of the sender is hidden behind whatever that sender thinks you should see instead of it. For instance, if the sender is "postmaster@google.com" <test@test.com> all you see is the (fraudulent) postmaster@google.com. This is to help scammers/spammers to hide their identity (because I don’t see any other reason to do it this way).
• likewise, modern email mechanics, like DKIM or DMARC not being compliant, are totally ignored and hidden in a submenu below a submenu in a dialog box, because nobody wants to see if this mail was actually from the address it claims to be from.

So, to put all of this together, while Outlook might be a halfway decent (but only halfway) groupware, it is most certainly still not an email client.

Teams

Some people think Teams is an all-integrated communication solution. It’s not. It’s an update to an update (Teams) to an update (Skype for Business) to an update (Lync) to a derelict communication solution (MSN messenger) that never worked right. And it still doesn’t.

Let me just mention some of the mistakes in Teams:

• the “chat” application is worse that everything, yes, even IRC. It wastes screen space, there’s no way to see the difference between people you communicate with unless you read everything (hey, even AIM had fixed that, back in the ’90s). We used to use Jabber (the original, not Cisco’s misnomer) with Openfire in the backend, and it not only worked, it was better in 2010 than Teams in 2023.
• chat groups are even worse, because you get no notifications for them. So every day (and maybe even several times a day) you have to enter the chat, go through every group you’re subscribed to and have to check if there are any new messages. Annoying, and could be fixed by a simple setting, but at least at my workplace it’s not.
• cut and paste is utterly broken. You just can’t mark text, copy it, and paste it into (say) an email. Or a different chat. Or anything really. This makes archiving important messages difficult for no reason, and means I have to use Sniptool more than I really want. (to explain this one: there was a simple schedule that I wanted to have available on my phone, without having to start Teams - because that would mean I give some program the ability to delete everything on my phone - and all I got was what was to happen first on every day, then what was to happen second, etc. pp. - totally not what I wanted).
• there’s no way to put any status messages on your user, the best workaround I found is to make an “autoreply” tell the user where you’re at/what you’re doing. Mine just says “use slack” because in Slack I have this possibility. And again, even AIM had this back in the ’90s.
• “apps” are compromising security on a regular basis. Why does a whiteboard app need full access to every user’s contact list? Shouldn’t it really be up to the client who sees your whiteboard?