Thing is, they only just understand what they have now. And they’re in the middle of a larger life project, for which cutting off email access RIGHT NOW with no more than SAME-DAY notice would effectively kill the project stone-dead and potentially leave them in a *terrible* financial mess.
Sure, as the email from MS points out, they *could* continue to collect emails from the web client until the upgrade has been completed. But that’s *another* thing to learn at a time when they’re least able to put time or mental power in to processing that kind of change.
From a technical perspective it really annoys me that a simple email service needs sufficient upgrades both to server and OS/client just to deliver electronic mail, for which standards for doing this sufficiently securely and efficiently have existed for *years* now, and seem to be followed by just about every other service provider on the planet. Even Apple’s iCloud service I *think* has eventually got over itself and eventually allowed standard IMAP login from non-Apple clients.
We’ll work out a solution – but this whole thing leaves a very bitter taste in the meantime, especially for those of us who just need to coach our users to get things done, because they don’t have the time and brain-space to keep pace with *everything* going on in tech world and why it’s shaped that way.
We in tech world would do well to put the users and tasks first for a change.
//abstractnoise 
Why would they be using Windows Live Mail anyways in 2016?? Is this a fucking joke?
Perhaps because it’s what was installed on their computer and still worked?
And please, no need for the swearing; But thanks for the valuable insight. It’s exactly this kind of “move on, it’s 2016 already” mindset that we tech folk need to perhaps tread more lightly with. We’re dealing with real users and real lives here, not a perfect world of limitless budgets and time to deal with whatever UI/”features” various vendors decide to throw at us in today’s auto-update, forced or not. I know of way too many XP (and earlier) installs used for exactly that reason – I might not *like* it but swearing at the users or their tech support people isn’t going to change it.
Still – on this one project, I at least got to install Windows 10 from scratch and in one hit remove GB’s of manufacturer crapware that has not been used since the machine was first set up in around 2010 – not to mention the semi-dormant malware that was found during backup checks.
Step 1 – set up a dedicated admin account
Step 2 – set up the user with their own day-to-day “user” account without admin privileges.