Microsoft suddenly bans LibreOffice developer's email account, blocks appeal

This tells me LibreOffice has become a threat to Microsoft, and I'm here for it.
If anyone else is curious what it's like, LibreOffice's site is here. Highly recommend.
- using Microsoft Word for too long makes me break out in Tourette's
  Writer is so much more understandable
  
  Word is proof that there is no God and that we're all alone in the cold vacuum of space. Word is every traffic light being red. Word is getting an itchy arsehole because you couldn't quite wipe yourself properly.
  
  I don't think anything in the software world has ever pissed me off as much as the fucking ribbon. "We've run out of ideas as far as the UI is concerned - just throw everything up there somewhere, menus, toolbars, whatever". A close second was their genius idea of hiding unused menu items so the locations of the items you do use are constantly changing.
  I don't use MS products any more but my 90 yo parents do and it's a fucking nightmare trying to help them with stuff. MS Office is certifiable elder abuse.
- It tells me microsoft is petty
  
  Large corporations have zero empathy for competition.
  What will their quarterly report say? Think of the stockholders. (/s)
  
  They literally blew billions of dollars and years of developer time just to screw the companies that won the argument of “open internet or Microsoft protocol” back in the day. Yes, petty.
- Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:
  https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/

Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.
- Even if you stay on GitHub, definitely mirror to another host. Git is designed to be distributed, why not make use of that capability!
- So either Codeberg, Sourcehut or Gitlab ??
  If you want to quit Git entirely then Fossil which has a built-in GUI & a fully-fledged alternative to both Git & Github & is self-hostable or Darcs/Pijul which are Patch-oriented
  
  codeberg is owned by a nonprofit. highly recommend it
  
  They probably meant purely self hosted. You can self hosted Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab, and probably many others.
  
  I host my main repository on my "lab server" at home, I got a copy on codeberg, and my public repo are mirrored on github.
  I specify in the github description that's a mirror with a link to codeberg.
  Github is the little outcast kid of the bunch...
  
  Self-hosted GitLab is what GNOME and Debian chose to do.
  I still use the main GitLab for most things.
  https://repo.or.cz/ provides just git hosting.
  It's also relatively easy to just self-host Git, though permissions can be wonky, at least last time I tried.
  I can't recommend Darcs. Luckily I don't see MS (or any other corp) being able to take over core Git development. I really should try Pijul again, but least time I played with it, the history/branch visualization (which you can do without, but I really like to have) was actually still worse than Darcs.
  
  Or self-host if that's feasible, MAS has been self-hosting for a while now, for example.
  
  Oh man, I hate the whole git system so much, it was like the worst part of coding.

Mafia shit cause the mob boss is the President.
- Lets be real here. They'd do it no matter who's in charge.
  
  They have been doing this for 40+ years

This isn't a conspiracy...
It's the reality of using Hotmail as a business account in 2025.
Which is frankly nuts.
But the author even says the same thing happened to them before too
- Using Hotmail for anything was already a bad idea, using it for an open-source dev account is worse. I don't understand why they haven't switched to something else 20 years ago.
  
  It's been a 365 account for years now. They just still use the domain.
- 95% of senior government officials across Africa will give you a fancy-ass, taxpayer funded, full color laminated plastic business card that lists their email address for official business as Gmail or Hotmail.
  Like... Today. Right now. I used to have a collection. Once got one with a 3D hologram thing. Fucking hotmail and gmail address.
- Yep, I don't remember the exact phrasing, but in these situations, I assume incompetence before I assume evil intent.
  Maybe it is intentional but the incompetence is in how obvious they are.
  
  Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetentance
  Is the saying, but it's definitely not always true.

No real reason to be using a hotmail account in this day and age, even less so if you're a developer of a direct competitor for Microsoft.
- Eh, that's the problem with email - it's much harder to change and migrate, because you can't guarantee others will use your new email, much less find out who somehow still has the old email to send messages to and expects a reply from.
  
  This is an argument for having your own domain for emails. There is an annual cost but at least your address isn't locked to a specific provider sokcd you can change some DNS settings to point at a different mail server.
  
  Unless you own the domain. Then switching providers is a simple DNS/MX/DKIM/DMARC update.
  
  Eh, that's when you just turn on auto-reply/forwarding and abandon it.
  But of course they need to be able to access it to enable auto-reply. :)
  
  Also you can get locked out of other services that use email for 2FA and password resets
  
  compared to what? much easier than phone numbers
- What alternative do you recommend that won't be blocked by Google and Microsoft? I hate Microsoft, but I can't even sign up for a Google account, and everywhere else I've tried is blocked by Google, Microsoft, or both.
  I self-hosted my email from 2006-2021, and do not have the stamina to do that any more.
  
  If your concern is being blocked, the best advice is to avoid any free email service and pony up for a paid one.
  ProtonMail used to be the big one, but IIRC they had some controversy recently:
  https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/proton-mail-exposing-activists-info-showed-the-limits-of-encryption/
  https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/the-intercept-proton-mail-says-it-s-politically-neutral-while-praising-republican-party/24456
  Other commenter already mentioned Zoho, but also mailbox.org.
  
  Zoho works well for me with my own domain (though I am on the old free plan that allows IMAP, while today the free plan only supports webmail or their own app). I also know someone who uses Tuta without problems sending to Google and Microsoft.
  
  I use posteo.de
- Do they even still issue them? Like prior to ~2007 Hotmail was THE free email to have before Google, like, did it better. But aren't they issuing outlook.com addresses now?
  
  Dunno... the last time I dealt with it was someone trying to reach my mom and couldn't.
  I asked them to verify the address...
  @hotmale.com
  Oh, well there's your problem!
  
  When MS ditched the Hotmail name, they went to their "Live" branding. I have an account with that domain, in addition to my old Hotmail account.
  I wish I held onto my old Yahoo account, but it got so full of spam that it became completely unusable; so I deleted it 🫤
  
  I stopped using Hotmail when gmail launched and I was given one of the early invites from a tech relative. I have the welcome email from '04.
  But now I'm looking at moving my emails to a self hosted solution because they have used everything in my >20year email history for Ai and I don’t want that to continue into the future.
- I just don't really value email accounts much. I have several and only rarely check them.

Relying on American companies is a liability in of itself.
While there is corruption everywhere and on a standardized basis, there are of course countries with higher levels of corruption, the US is the #1 source of corruption and criminality in the world. Additionally it's the ideological centre for global oligarch/criminal gangs.
Microsoft's monopoly in Windows and Office alone results in extraction of hundreds of billions of dollars from companies and individuals all around the world.

What isn't made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone's account gets flagged for "suspicious activity" or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.
- Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail's account recovery process.)
- Doesn't he live in Moscow? So it might just be due to the sanctions.
  
  Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)
  That could be it. What is certain is that these big corps really don't want to pay human beings to sort out issues so if you get caught in the middle of some BS you may have no recourse out of it.

Why do I feel like any customer support has been replaced by ai and it has led to this show of shit?
- Replaced? They didn't have any in the first place
- Most likely, yes. Probably some sort of automation that ran wild.
- Big tech companies never had any CS people.

By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.
Whenever I see a story of "some guy who relies on
<big tech account>
working loses access to it and suddenly can't do anything anymore" I think "this can never happen to me". Which means there's a whole category of problems you're suddenly never going to see. It also means you're less naive. So just don't vendor-lock yourself in. Don't put a log-in for an account which you don't control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.
On top of that, you'll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I'm just saying, if you don't even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you'll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.
I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it's probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn't vendor-lock yourself in.
- I have this exact same thought. I see things like this and I'm like, God, I'm glad I don't have any of that shit.

Well now i know Linux is ready to switch over to.
Thanks Microsoft!

MS ❤️ Open Source
(/s)

Who in their right mind uses hotmail?
- Same kinds of people who still pay for AOL.

why are people that are building FOSS software not using FOSS software to build it? Gitlab? Forgejo?
- People are complicated and FOSS isn't as simple as all or nothing.
  Sometimes people have things setup before they discovered FOSS - it's hard for me to give up my gmail account from age 14, even though I run my own domain now.
  Sometimes FOSS gets captured - Microsoft owns githib now, which makes tough decisions for all the projects hosted there.
  
  Thanks for the reply, cheers.

Eat shit, microsoft

What, Microsoft? The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them? Microsoft the convicted monopoly?
Noooooo! It can't be! They're so . . . uh . . . ubiquitous.
- The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them?
  Ironically enough, their biggest failure to do this was when they let the iPhone (with the help of Android) removed-slap Windows Mobile and Windows Phone out of existence.
  
  Classic Monkeyballmer

High likelihood this just some AI bot with no oversight fucking up than something malicious. Outlook.com's support system is atrocious and devoid of humans at this point unless you're an enterprise.
I tried to go through their support to tell them their junk filter was fucking up (bank alerts being marked as junk with no way to override) and got nowhere after like two months. Had to change the email I use for banking.

Can someone suggest me good alternatives to both Microsoft's mailing system (Outlook, etc.), and to Github, just in case?
- For Outlook as an E-Mail client: I like Claws-Mail or just standard Thunderbird.
  For Outlook as an E-Mail Service: Either Self-Host or find a good provider (I have a small German company where I pay 1€/month and get great service)
  As an GitHub alternative, I use sourcehut. The link is sr.ht btw
- I use Codeberg.
  Edit: fixed the link.
  
  Link errors out when I try to open it
  
  They're annoyingly only allowing open source repos and active forks etc..
- Thunderbird, Mailo, Codeberg
- Self hosting email is HARD if you aren't an expert but I figured it out. It took a while to get it stable and usable but man it has felt so good being in control of my email. Worth the effort. I use mailu, which is docker based. Works great.
  
  Id argue it hard to set up, we not hard just lots of interconnecting pieces, but once you are going it's very easy to maintain. I just set up an email server from scratch in a about a day.
- I use posteo.de, rarely with the web interface though, I use software clients for email

EU should really create rule to use only EU FOSS tech for goverment services. For all member states.

What was a LibreOffice developer doing using Microsoft stuff in the first place?
If you use Microsoft or Meta or any of the usual suspects, and they screw up or get hacked or behave badly, don't be all surprised and complain. It's what they do, and they don't care, and never listen. You know this.

Empty story with clickbait title. Wouldn’t expect any less from modern “journalists”

Microsoft + GitHub = if you're using it still W T F are you thinking!!!
- Cries in NixOS

I am a newbie in LibreOffice, but I am wondering whether me chronicling my first experiences in it would be worth doing.
I think what we sorely lack is more people like Nick and Michael Horn making approachable tech news about this niche.
I understand that to some the idea itself of the tech news cycle, focused on its own navel all the time is not appealing, but I think that is exactly there that a channel like this could distinguish itself, showcasing OSS solutions having an impact on the public good, something the usual news outlets cannot afford to do since every second is lost revenue.
The only risk is being boring.
- I think it would be worthwhile, and probably help some people.

I'm not as in the loop these days - are some Linux pundits still trying the "maybe MS isn't as bad as they used to be" line or have we learned again now?

To much of a power use to use LibreOffice exclusively, but it is amazing for what it is and Microsoft is absolute shit

https://youtu.be/H27rfr59RiE

probably forgot the account still existed. was it libreoffice@hotmail.com? eh

We really need some consumer protections around emails.
Imagine if your landlord could just intercept your mail on the same way.
It's part of our identities.
We're living in the Wild-West of the internet

Microsoft going down the shitter

Old news.