My university decided to switch their mailing software to outlook. So no smtp/imap in the future. How am I supposed to do my mailing stuff now? I use older ("non-microsoft") mail clients like mutt or upas? What about standards? Aargh

I'm confused, outlook has smtp.

smtp-mail.outlook.com:587
And
imap-mail.outlook.com:993

Outlook follows the modern standards

Outlook itself maybe, but not our university's outlook installation. I guess they're like: we offer office so they can use it. I'm not using windows on laptop A and my laptop B's os is not binary compatible to anything and it's ancient browser has no js and only rudimentary css

@Codex404 so they should ditch mail itself. It's not secure, could be faster, html mails are crap and for file sharing there are much better alternatives. Mail is ancient technology. It should be compatible with ancient standards if they are commonly used

@sirjofri Maybe just ask to reenable SMTP/IMAP?
Exchange (how the mail server is called, Outlook is just the frontend) definitely supports it.

Jetbrains has an "Exchange-to-Standard" program, which allows to use normal email clients: http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

@sbiewald I guess I'll just ask. Maybe it's active but didn't tell us.

That JetBrains software is a client software I guess? No chance, I cannot install it anywhere. I could try implement my own upasfs like solution and my own mailer for exchange stuff? I don't think the information is available online...

@sirjofri mail itself is not "not insecure". There are tons of services that handle E2E encryption of emails.

And if it is that insecure, ancient etc. Just don't use it.

@sirjofri Not, it is not a client, but a local server which provides local IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/... access.

@sbiewald (that's what I meant by client. It's running on the client side. I could try install it on another machine. But I don't really want that)

In still confused... hits mute.

@Codex404 mail itself is insecure. Read the rfc: the default mailing protocols provide no encryption at all. We can use tls/ssl and other encryption protocols to make the transfer more secure and use pgp/gpg to have e2e encryption (which is sadly complicated compared to using it as is). I'm an IT guy and don't use pgp because it's complicated and I know only one person (that I never write) that uses it. So it's useless for me.

I once read: bad security that everybody can use is better than good security that's so complicated that no one uses it. I think that's true

check out davmail!!

@sirjofri it's really complicated indeed. I don't have to do anything. Using WhatsApp is more difficult.

@sirjofri What do you mean, you can't install it anywhere?

By the way, the Exchange Active Sync protocol (or has the name changed now?) is documented, so you could work with it. But I won't expect to much.

@sirjofri About the "insecurity of the mail protocol" and just "ditching" it:
Do not forget that there is no accepted (i.e. widely used) alternative for mail, additionally the student email address grants access to many software licences (e.g. Jetbrains Proffesional editions, Office365, Github "pro", ...), which many do not want to lose.

@sbiewald that's why we still use it. Personally I like the protocol for it's simple design. It's more a response to codex's answer about modern standards etc. It would be unreasonable to ditch mail. And not just unreasonable, it would be impossible.

It's like the web: it's bad because it's simple, but it's good that it's simple (or so)

@sbiewald and I will look into it. Maybe I can implement this for plan9 systems. There are other users, too

if you wanna overengineer this, wrap the calls to a fake IMAP server via a program on some device that fucks with Outlook directly to send your mail?

also just use the SMTP/IMAP servers lol

I looked into it. This outlook installation only has imap and pop3. No smtp! Also I couldn't manage to use the imap interface with upas.

I also think about sending all those mail to my personal mailserver and use the interfaces there. Maybe I can manage to send mail as the other address like google does