New Outlook push and making sure Microsoft isn't storing my email on their servers

[MouseAssassin]

PSA: Microsoft is pushing the web based Outlook to Windows users without giving the option to decline syncing email to their servers and keep using the existing clients. Hopefully the way around this (source) is to delete

settings.json

 

from

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\Migration

 

without agreeing to sync contents when The New Outlook first launches.

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I have been happily using the built-in Mail application since Windows 8, when they added support for Email, Contacts and Calendar syncing with Google accounts, and have been doing my best to avoid The New Outlook like the plague it is.

Not only Microsoft's replacement mail app is a ###### Electron wrapper for the online version, it comes with ads AND to work it requires everything to be synced to "The Microsoft Cloud", so instead of just Google reading through my email to advertise, I'd have to allow Microsoft to do so too.

Up until now, this meant living with a new toggle in the toolbar and dismissing messages inviting me to to turn it on, but today was different: I got a message saying that on the next start of the Mail app I'd be moved to The New Outlook and I'd be able to toggle back afterwards, no option to refuse. At that point, I checked my installed apps and The New Outlook was there again (I had removed it once already when it first popped up).

I then closed the Mail app, waited a bit, and tried to reopen it. Sure enough, the app closed itself immediately and launched The New Outlook, which is where things get interesting: on launch, the only thing displayed is a wizard asking to enable syncing content in the Gmail account to "The Microsoft Cloud", with no option to refuse except by creating a new Outlook.com account. The rest of the window is empty, with no toggle to go back to the old Mail app (I assume it only shows up in the main UI after the wizard is complete)

After poking around a bit, I closed the app, without clicking the Continue button in the content sync dialog. Further attempts to launch Mail would repeat the same behaviour, basically locking me out of checking my own email.

It was only by finding this support article that I found a way to have the old Mail app launch again - by
deleting settings.json from %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\Migration

At this point my worry is: did I actually prevent the syncing of my data to Microsoft's servers? Is there any way to check? If someone has gone through these steps, does the syncing need to be approved via Google's Oauth2 flow or does Microsoft just reuse the original authorization Windows gets when adding a Gmail account?

 

 

[JustGeorge]

You must've missed the toast notification that popped up a few years ago, where Microsoft informed us all that we no longer own our devices or data. This agreement extends into perpetuity. They're not sorry for the inconvenience.

[hellowalkman Reporter]

thanks for bringing it to our notice. We have posted a front page news article on the topic https://www.neowin.net/news/new-outlook-for-windows-wants-to-send-your-non-msa-data-to-its-servers-for-your-own-good/

[+devHead Subscriber²]

Yeah, it just decided it was time to switch over, even though this change was not required until next year.  I would dismiss the yellow banner at the top, and now it just decided - nope, you're getting it NOW!  Such a pain in the butt.