A few months ago I wrote about the ‘end of support life’ of Office 2010.That happened at the beginning of this year for Office 2010 and for most purposes the software still works fine. Office 2007 was ‘EOL’ a few years ago and is much less functional now, but can still work on some older computers.
However… we’ve heard in the last few days that several major email services are pulling access for Outlook 2010.The Outlook.com platform is the first to announce this-so that is any email addresses ending with hotmail.com, outlook.com,msn.com,live.com (plus the .co.uk and other national versions too) will stop working with the Outlook 2010 app very soon. Gmail have already dropped support and this will quickly be the same case with other major services like yahoo, AOL and BT, etc.
The main reason is due to older encryption standards. Outlook 2010 does not nicely support TLS 1.2 encryption and this is soon going to be the minimum requirements for almost all email services. There are some cheeky work-arounds for Outlook 2010 but you’re only delaying the inevitable as in the next few months OAuth will also become the norm for web based email services too and that will definitely not work with Outlook 2010 and earlier.
TLS and other encryption languages are a good thing; they mean your data will be encrypted when messages are being sent and received and that will protect your private information from snoopers.
If you’ve found that Outlook 2010hasstopped working with your email, then it’s time to change to more modern software. Outlook 2013 and newer will happily work with modern email services, the latest version of Office 365 and 2021 works on Windows 10 or 11 PCs and the latest three Mac OS versions too, so one option is to upgrade your Office suite.
If you don’t fancy paying dear for Microsoft Office, then Thunderbird is made by the Mozilla team (famous for the Firefox Browser) and it’s a good free email client app. There are other free email apps too like Windows 10 Mail, mailbird, eM Client and more, but we recommend Thunderbird for being open-source software that is good, fast and easy to work with.
As I said in May, Office 2007 is now dangerous to use due to virus risks. Office 2010 support has ended but it’s still okay to use if you have decent antivirus and don’t need email services in Outlook.