To me this is the #1 reason this looks fake - nobody uses Mail for Windows, it probably doesn't support the security features available in O365, feels totally wrong for someone at MS.

What do you mean "fake"? It's a court document from a federal lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_v._Microsoft

I'm seeing a banner in the app saying that they are replacing it with (the new) Outlook in 2024

I'm in the accelerated testing group and I was moved from Mail to the new Outlook a couple of months ago. It's better than Mail for Windows in my subjective opinion, but it was a bit weird to switch just when Mail had gotten the last missing basic features, like signatures etc.

I swear Outlook peaked with Outlook 2003 and has just kept getting worse since then.

New Outlook is just atrocious from a design perspective IMO. Everything is flat, and the panels all blend into each other. All the emails subjects run right into the next.

On top of that it just wastes so much space. It's offensive how they manage to both waste space and still have things right up against each other blurring the lines of emails.

Besides Edge and ads everywhere in windows, I think the complete mishmash of design styles and general "unpolished" feel of their apps are really making me wonder why even use Windows. I don't want to fight my software just to use it.

I tried the Outlook, and vs the Mail it seemed like an unnecessary complication.

Could it be an Outlook Express revival?

No. It is terrible, a webview around the shitty outlook.com web UI, which is cluttered, inconvenient, and often buggy, especially when rich text editing is needed. Also the Bcc field is hidden and needs some weird incantations to display the field. A steming platform, as it can be read in the emails.

Outlook Express was almost peak outlook usability, and is on the decline ever since. More useless features, and ever worse GUI.

Poor Satya

I’m glad someone is using it.

I bet he hates it but can’t stop using it. It’s strange how terrible the tool is given the CEO is using it.

Although perhaps he did like many others and updated the iOS mail signature to say “Sent from Mail for Windows.”

I liked it for it's simplicity a few years ago (and I always hated Outlook... The Bat was great, and Thunderbird had a few okay years, but basically sucked at the core thing of syncing and reading mails), but haven't really used it for actual emailing.

It tells a lot about corporate culture that when this happens, we celebrate it.

It should be the expectation, not celebration.

Except it's an absolute cargo cult of a signature.

"Sent from iPhone", and later "Sent from Mobile" were a thing because virtual keyboards were new, and at first, everyone was slow and imprecise on them.

So the signature was basically a way to say "Hey, sorry if this is abrupt or have typos, but I wrote it from my phone".

It makes zero reasons to include an automatic "Sent from <Desktop App>" signature in every email, except for sad, pathetic, marketing.

While it is pathetic marketing, it predates the iphone considerably. Hotmail started adding an automatic "Sent from Hotmail" signature shortly after launching in 1996: https://techcrunch.com/2009/10/18/ps-i-love-you-get-your-fre...