I recently needed to find an XP-compatible email client for Micro$oft 365. Initially I asked about it in an odd place, @roytam1's browser thread, for two reasons:
- In addition to XP-compatible browsers, Roytam1 maintains a couple of XP-compatible email clients: IceDove and MailNews.
- The folks who follow that thread are very knowledgeable about modern Internet protocols in general.
The stumbling block was the need for OAuth2 authentication. With modern email services like Micro$oft 365, you can't just enter your password into your email client anymore. As it happens, MailNews does support OAuth2, but that still wasn't enough. To work with modern email services, your email client now needs to be registered with their servers, something that was never done for MailNews. Luckily, @AstroSkipper pointed me to an XP-compatible email client that is registered with several popular email services including Micro$oft 365: Outlook Express Classic.
... so I went with OE Classic. I've now been using it for about a month.
Unfortunately, I'm not particularly happy. OE Classic has several bugs and quirks that are problematic for serious use:
- My biggest gripe is with the severe limitations of the free version; particularly its insistence on dropping ads for itself into the first pages of all your emails. Thus, you're forced to upgrade to the Pro version for $37 before you can even evaluate it properly. I was able to tell that it did work with Micro$oft 365, but that was about all. (Also, your $37 only entitles you to use the "Pro" features on one machine. I would've expected 3: one each for home, work, and laptop. At a minimum, the software should give you 30 days before the limitations kick in!) So I paid my $37, and at first I was happy; but then I started finding other problems.
- Every time OE Classic polls the server for new email, it changes the focus to the last email on the list, causing you to have to find and select the email you were reading all over again. And I don't mean it moves to the most recent email; I really mean the last email on the list, however it happens to be sorted at the time. I often sort by sender or subject to find related emails, and if OE Classic polls the server while I have it sorted that way, I find myself looking at the Y's and Z's instead of what I was looking at before! (If I'm reading a specific email, a workaround I found is to open the email I'm reading. The main page will still move to the last email on the list, but the email I'm reading remains open in a separate window. So this isn't a complete show-stopper, but it's still quite annoying.)
- If a recoverable error occurs while polling the email server, OE Classic's response is to pop up an error window - and then just stop! It won't poll the server any more until you dismiss the window. This can cause you to miss incoming email if it happens while you're doing something else, such as Web browsing.
- If an unrecoverable error occurs, such as needing to re-authenticate (perhaps because my email password has changed, or just because Micro$oft 365 is being cranky), the only way to re-authenticate is to delete the account and recreate it from scratch! I'm required to change my password every 60 days, so this is really irritating!
- OE Classic doesn't appear to use multiple processes. This can really slow you down when using the IMAP protocol, especially if you have a lot of folders. It takes quite a while to refresh everything, during which, if you click on an email that needs to be downloaded from the server, you get to stare at a blank email for several seconds until OE Classic finally finishes what it's doing and gets around to downloading the email you clicked on.
- The "Unread messages" count on each folder doesn't update until you click on the folder to view it! That can cause you to miss emails that get sent to a folder other than the one you're viewing.
- The "Find" function doesn't work, at least on Windows XP. Perhaps it needs Windows Search installed, which I haven't done, but the original OE and Windows Live Mail had at least some search capability that didn't rely on Windows Search being installed.
- A more minor bug is, on Windows XP only, icons all have black backgrounds instead of transparent ones. (This didn't seem to be a problem when I tried it on Windows 7 though; only on XP.)
If OE Classic just had one or two of these kinds of issues, I'd probably live with it and/or (if the issues were really annoying) get with the developer to see if he could fix them. But there are so many, I decided to start a thread here instead. Is anything else available for Windows XP - or even Vista?
I did find one: IncrediMail v2.5. The free version is supposed to be adware, but I don't mind as long as I'm the one who has to look at the ads!
Unfortunately the developer pulled the plug on this product a few years ago, so you can't register IncrediMail any more - but the client does work on XP, at least for a while. (I suspect, though, that without being able to register, it won't work forever - does anyone know?) Unfortunately IncrediMail 2.5 predates Micro$oft 365, so I can't use it. I don't know if there's a newer XP-compatible version either. I haven't found a copy to try yet.