I read it as needing a Microsoft account, and having to accept Microsft’s terms and conditions, in order to contribute to an unrelated (and probably open-source) project. That’s a valid complaint.

My approach with companies that do this: Contact them, explain that I will not be giving them any money due to this aggressive anti-privacy practice, and take my business elsewhere.

ISO 8601 date format. Not because it’s from a standards body, but because it’s simple, sensible, clearly defined, easy to recognize, and very effective.

Date field placement in any order other than most-significant-digits-first is not only counterintuitive, but needlessly complicated to work with. Omitting critical information like the century is ambiguous and confusing.

We don’t live in isolated villages any more. Mixing and matching those problems by accepting all the world’s various regional and personal date styles, especially with no reliable indication of which ones apply in any given case, leads to the hodgepodge of error-prone date madness that we have today.

The 2024-09-02 format should be taught in schools and required in official documents. Let the antiquated date styles fall into disuse outside of art and personal correspondence, like cursive writing.

Also, when building services that are expected to send HTML email, make sure to generate a plain text version of the content and put it in the appropriate multipart section of the message. Otherwise, people reading in plain text won’t see it unless they’re willing to jump through hoops to do so (and there’s a good chance they’ll toss it in the trash instead).

Bonus points if the plain text part is formatted well.