there is then zero switching cost outside

Tell me again how you’ve never supported an email service migration. I’m delighted that you haven’t, but it’s obvious.

Also, I love when people pull a “draw the rest of the owl” with tech they’ve never been up in the guts of.

Emails also come in standardized formats that can be downloaded and transferred to a new provider, too.

Oh, you sweet sweet thing. I remember when I believed that technical specs were reliable and things were interoperable because documentation said they were.

I can still see their tears.

Maybe it truly is that easy with other providers to switch from one to another, but Outlook, and especially the Exchange backend underneath (both the effectively discontinued self-hosted server version and the Azure-managed Exchange Online) are a special kind of jank.

There isn’t a special layer or kind of hell for whoever designed it. There isn’t even a specific hell in and of itself.

Whatever exists after death for the designers of Outlook and Exchange is something so much worse than hell that it’s categorically different from anything able to be conceptualized by humans. We don’t have words to even begin to describe the gulf between comprehendable human thought and what awaits for them.