GOOD FUCKING BYE, Outlook and CoPilot!
I've had it! No matter what boxes I click, no matter how I hack my Windows operating system, that fucking CoPilot continues to float in and out of my Microsoft work efforts like a bad fart! The hack to my OS is still in place, but as for Office 365, there is no "one" switch to turn the odious intrusion off - lo and behold, the active "CoPilot" icon remains on the tool bar.
LibreOffice is working great; nary an AI bot pops up in any of my documents, presentations or spreadsheets. It converts the Microsoft materials to Libre-centric versions.
So that left me with Outlook. I use routinely use and maintain four Email accounts. One specifically for financial, one for general communications, one for eCommerce and the last for Social Media. I HAD two options;
- The Yahoo/Gmail mail app and web portal that flooded my inbox with marketing ads even when had the ad-block extensions installed.
- ...and Outlook. Outlook DOES handled multiple Mail accounts, but would not disconnect from or uninstall CoPilot.
I have been a massive fan of Mozilla Firefox. Use it on EVERYTHING; desktop, mobile and tablets. Works great on iOS, Windows and Google/Android! Blocks the crap! Does a fantastic job with safe and secure browsing. On investigating, discovered that Mozilla has an Email service called Thunderbird!
All four mail accounts! I was able to import my entire Outlook calendar .ics file into the desktop version, and for me, that works just fine.
And then the Thunderbird Android app - spent some time today getting that installed and customized!
To quote Erik Dyson - "It Just Works". No drama. No AI wanting to compose my Email. Just... EMAIL!!! The one thing I am still exploring is the connection between the desktop and mobile calendar. But for now, that is a minor nit.
3 comments:
Wow, you are certainly a techie! I mean that as a compliment.
Art said: If you haven't already, why? Why would anyone use Windows? Linux is waaay more secure. Linux Mint is a mature, and free, version and it is dead-easy to install and use. Even on old hardware. If you're not sure you want to take the leap you can run the OS from a Thumb drive. Or you can, with a bit more courage, install it beside the MS abomination and select the OS from a list when you boot up. Latest iteration of Mint is functionally the same as Windows with different ap names.
Thunderbird is grand. But once you cut those strings most people want to go all the way.
Force of habit, and too tired to keep the Tech Support hat on. Been on Windows since my box of 13 Win95 diskettes back in the mid-1990's. Been my mainstay in corporate life through retirement, though I did dabble in Ubuntu and other Linux OS's. I liked (past tense) Windows because I understood the OS. Up to Win10. Now on Win11; I hate it. Hate everything about it - that everything is "in the cloud" and has a fucking AI underpinning that seems to nefariously pop up when I least expect it. But for me, after retiring from 36 years in IT, Cloud Services and Cyber Security using Window's operating systems, it began as just something familiar that I did not have to work too hard at maintaining. NOW... that has changed a lot. My little laptop is locked down; AI has been deactivated on it. It's a little over 2 years old, and starting to show signs of getting bogged down under the latest Windows updates. When it get too heinous to use, I'll consider the switch.
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