MS Outlook Copies User E-emails From Other Accounts To Microsoft Cloud

MS Outlook Copies User E-emails From Other Accounts To Microsoft Cloud.

Together with Windows11 update 23H2 comes more and more surprises for its users.

Microsoft brought this new Outlook app as an alternative to Mail and Calendar apps “at no extra cost to you”, yeah, but they skipped the part about stealing your e-mail conversations.

It syncs the users data, including credentials and emails, to Microsoft Cloud by default.

This means your precious "G-mail", Yahoo and other third-party accounts as well, unless specified otherwise.

Outlook users will have their IMAP/POP3, SMTP credentials and a lot of emails automatically transferred to Microsoft servers without their given consent, as reported by the German jornal Heise.de.

Basically when you want to add additional e-mail accounts, but from a different provider like G-Mail, a pop-up informs you:

“For better experience, your messages, events, and contacts will be synced to the Microsoft Cloud.” More about this here.

This means that Microsoft will create duplicate copies of all your messages, on its own servers.

The journal Heise.de was able to observe Microsoft creating copies of credentials such as login name, password, and destination server. Moreover, the data traveled in plain text, although using cryptographic Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.

“Without informing or asking, Microsoft grants itself full access to the IMAP and SMTP access data of users of the new Outlook,” Heise’s reporting warns.

Microsoft support pages states that this is done “to enhance your Microsoft 365 experience in New Outlook for Windows.”

In addition to this: Travel and deliveries tracking.

This practice is most likely illegal in some countries beginning with the EU for starters with their GDPR and perhaps even in Brazil with their LGPD law.

Pay attention:

Outlook users who do not want to sync their data with Microsoft should choose the option “Sync directly with [Provider]” while setting up new accounts.

Fischgericht posted: Spot on here.

I am a bit puzzled that I have not been reading about this in any big US media, not even IT ones. How did you first learn about it?

This IS a big deal and should be a scandal people are educated about, and Microsoft should be forced to stop this immediately. It's interesting that Microsoft appears to have managed to stay under the radar with these deceptive tactics...

MS doesn't need to do anything. They don't need to pay anyone off. EU bureaucracy is extremely strongly wedded to MS products like Windows, Office, Teams, Outlook etc. As are all EU national bureaucracies and public institutions. c4mpute wrote.

Neither of the above comments are a surprise. You see professionals do not use Windows.