I'm forced to use MS Outlook at work. I don't use it at home, and I refused to use it at my last place of work. Over the years that I've not used Outlook, I've never had email virus problems, while colleagues have received and sent them without even realising. Since I've been forced to use Outlook I've had time to actually evaluate it, rather than my previous dismissal without first hand evidence.
I can say that Outlook is possibly one of the worst pieces of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. It's slow and clunky. Insists on sending everything as HTML and raw text. Forces me to see other people's appalling taste in screen fonts and colours. Encourages people to put their answers at the top of the message, leading to huge messages full of repeated text. It doesn't even do in-line spell checking, I have to run that as one extra step! The list goes on and on.
Okay I'm only using Outlook 97 (8.x), but I'd have to say for a product claiming to be on version 8, it's pretty immature, and needs a darned good sorting out. I find Eudora, Pegasus or even Netscape Mail better products that Outlook, I think I even found KMail 0.x a better application and I only used it for a few days!
Re:Some right some wrong.
ajt on 2003-05-16T13:38:45
It sounds as if MS have allowed the user to turn-off some of the worst aspects of Outlook, which is nice for a change. If you can use POP or IMAP then I think there is plenty of choice on plenty of platforms, if you are bound to the evils of MS Exchange Server, then life gets more difficult. I can't honestly say I know of an alternative, and like you I'd like to know if there are some. I think there are various Linux Exchange compatible projects, but I don't know how far they have got, or if there is anything for us poor Windows users.
Re:Some right some wrong.
TeeJay on 2003-05-16T15:10:49
we have an IMAP server in our office and many different clients - Mozilla, mutt, pine, and outbreak.
