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Switching to Outlook

February 21, 2007

Last week I switched from Thunderbird to Microsoft Outlook for my desktop email client. (No, I have not gone insane, but using a better different product weakened my ability to support Outlook for other users)  Here are my complaints impressions:

  • Outlook must have been designed by someone with perfect eyesight

  • When using “large icons” for the toolbar, the application just scales up the small icons so they look crappy and pixelated.  As bloated full-featured as Outlook is, couldn’t they have created a large icon set?
  • Very illogical workflow.  One example: “Purge deleted messages” is in the Edit menu.  Wouldn’t you expect to find it under the Action menu, along with all the other message actions like “New Message” and “Reply”?  Purging deleted messages isn’t really an editing function.
  • Good luck finding the signature dialog.  Oh, wait, there it is… buried way the hell down into a dialog.  But I change my signature quote every week.
  • Don’t bother having any of your own viewing preferences as to type size, font, etc.  Microsoft knows better than you and will undo them for you next time you start the application.
  • Outlook is noticeably slower than Thunderbird.  When outlook is thinking, you may as well sit with your hands folded on the table because your mouse and keyboard are purely decorative.
  • Outlook pipes http links to Internet Explorer, even though my default browser is Firefox.

That’s all for now.

Categories: Geeky, Software
  1. February 21, 2007 at 13:41 | #1

    I have used Outlook at work and Tbird (until recently, when I changed to GMail) at home, so I guess I got used to the dichotomy.  Outlook isn’t bad (Tbird has some idiosyncratic menu choices, too, and what’s with having to manually compact folders?), but it’s way too bloated for most home users.  I dearly wish I could open at will just the individual modules.

    Re: sigs.  Most business users do not change their sigs.  Remember that the product is for office drones, not for ordinary people.  (I say that as a part-time office drone.)

    You *can* tell Outlook what browser to use as your default.  Somewhere.  I know that my Outlook goes to FF when I click on a link.

  2. February 21, 2007 at 13:50 | #2

    The contact information in my sig stays the same – the only change I make is an amusing quote at the end, usually about technology.  It’s a little reward to the reader who suffers through the banality of the rest of the message.

    Compacting folders is a database-like operation that shouldn’t be attempted when the connection is shaky. 

    Email should be fast and lean.  Outlook is neither.

  3. February 21, 2007 at 13:59 | #3

    Oh, I understand about rotating signature, believe me.  I’m just saying the design mindset is that office folks don’t change their signatures that often, if ever.  I’m not saying the mindset is a good one.  :-)

    (There are a variety of signature tools and the like out there that you might look into to see if any of them interact well with Outlook.)

    I don’t think that Tbird’s folder compaction process is either efficient or user-friendly.  It’s very 1995. 

    I agree that Outlook is neither fast nor lean—but it’s not an e-mail tool, but a PIM, integrating e-mail and notes and tasks and calendars and journaling and anything else you can imagine. As such, it’s not surprising (esp. coming from MS) that it’s bloated.

  4. February 21, 2007 at 14:14 | #4

    I have a strong suspicion that in three more years we will not be using local email clients at all.  Outlook Web Access in Exchange and Gmail, both web apps, are two early examples of the direction we’re headed.

  5. February 21, 2007 at 15:01 | #5

    Agreed.  OWA (2003) is about 95% of what you get with the Outlook client, without the bother of keeping the files on your own server.  You don’t get access offline, but that can be handled in other ways.

  6. February 21, 2007 at 18:58 | #6

    Personally, I’m about to give Evolution another try. When I last tried it (a long time ago), its poor support for encrypted emails compared to Thunderbird was a showstopper.

    Maybe I’ll give Outlook another chance when there’s a native, open-source, and free version for Linux. Oh wait, that just about describes Evolution ;-)

  7. February 21, 2007 at 22:55 | #7

    Maybe I’ll give Outlook another chance when there’s a native, open-source, and free version for Linux. Oh wait, that just about describes Evolution

    :lol:

    For me I see no reason to use outlook.  I just use gmail, and from a great tip I got from one of Dave’s readers, I added my work email account to Gmail.  So now I just use one Gmail account to manage all the others.  From one gmail account I can send and recieve email from the appropriate account. 

    Pretty nifty stuff if I do say so myself.  Give me Gmail or give me death!!

  8. February 22, 2007 at 00:08 | #8

    Well, I use GMail at home (well, at work, too, but for my home mail), too—but the office uses Outlook, and it’s convenient enough for those purposes to use, too.  Especially since it syncs nicely with my Palm.

  9. February 22, 2007 at 09:27 | #9

    One problem with gmail and the like is that I don’t trust them with personal data.

  10. February 22, 2007 at 10:12 | #10

    There is that.  My concern about going with online mail was that I feared the vendor either (a) going belly-up, or (b) just plain old losing everything.

    Concern (a) didn’t seem to apply to Google, and I suspect the chances were better that (b) would happen to me on my PC before it would happen on the Google side of things.  I may be proven wrong, which would be annoying.

    But as far as the “personal data” stuff, that’s an issue, yet it isn’t.  Any info you have online can be hacked, or subpoenaed, or resold, or just left in the open.  If you’re exchanging personal e-mail with someone, you’re entering into an area of risk/trust with (a) your mailing host, (b) their mailing host, (c) their mail system (are *they* using online mail?), and (d) them.  Google doesn’t seem to me to be the weakest link in that chain of possible goof-ups or betrayals.

  11. February 22, 2007 at 10:51 | #11

    When Google makes hundreds of millions off of ad-click stuff I can’t see why they would care with whom I email or get viagra spam from.  It seems to me they would have to spend money and time to find that out when they could use that money and time to make more profits.

  12. February 22, 2007 at 11:21 | #12

    **Dave, I’m well aware that any number of parties can legally or illegally intercept, store, and analyze connection data or content.

    Where the issue of trust looms largest is with the party that stores the actual data. Google in particular has a reputation for never actually deleting anything. Between correlating search terms, email data, and use of whatever web services they provide, I have concerns.

    To answer Webs, it’s not that Google cares about you or me. Beyond a doubt they data-mine, though, and try to target the ads and sponsored links you see. In that respect, they care about every user of theirs.

  13. February 22, 2007 at 14:30 | #13

    To answer Webs, it’s not that Google cares about you or me. Beyond a doubt they data-mine, though, and try to target the ads and sponsored links you see. In that respect, they care about every user of theirs.

    Correct, but this is handled by a computer program that catches key words and uses them to decide on what ads to deliver.  There is no one sitting around looking at the content of the messages.  I cannot verify this with a hundred percent accuracy but I can say that those ads they deliver are never 100% on the money.  This leads me to conclude that it is a program that runs, since it obviously hasn’t been 100% fine tuned, and probably never will be.

    Google has nothing to gain actually knowing the content of the emails.  But they have a lot to gain by knowing key words.  This doesn’t in any way threaten me.

  14. February 22, 2007 at 15:17 | #14

    Well, Webs, the NSA eavesdropping is also handled by a computer program that catches keywords, does a bit of traffic analysis, and decides which DHS agents to deliver ;-) Are you threatened by the DHS knowing key words of your emails and phone conversations?

    I don’t know whether or not Google data-mines the content of email, but I suspect they do. They certainly can correlate email traffic patterns with your search history, what you look at using Google Earth, and so on. If Google ever gets sold, will you feel as unthreatened by the hypothetical new owner? Are you confident that Google has your own best interest in mind? That Google will never sell data? I’m not saying I’m threatened by what Google does or suspect it does, but neither am I happy about it.

    By the way, the one thing I would never, ever do is to allow Google, Yahoo, or any other free webmail provider to pull email from another account of mine.

  15. February 22, 2007 at 15:32 | #15

    Well, Webs, the NSA eavesdropping is also handled by a computer program that catches keywords, does a bit of traffic analysis, and decides which DHS agents to deliver wink Are you threatened by the DHS knowing key words of your emails and phone conversations?

    NSA aint catchin emails, but phone conversations yes.  And yes it is a computer that does this.  But the difference is that the NSA has people who are data mining and listening in on phone calls that have key words said.

    Google has no one looking at emails.  Their ad system is done completely by computer.  So yes I am threatened by the NSA but not by Google.

    If Google ever gets sold, will you feel as unthreatened by the hypothetical new owner? Are you confident that Google has your own best interest in mind? That Google will never sell data? I’m not saying I’m threatened by what Google does or suspect it does, but neither am I happy about it.

    To answer all of these questions, I trust Google’s privacy policy, and accepted it.  Therefore both of us have entered into a binding legal contract.  If Google decides to go off of the contract, I and other consumers of their products have reason to sue, even if their business is sold.

    Terms of Use

    # Advertisements. As consideration for using the Service, you agree and understand that Google will display ads and other information adjacent to and related to the content of your email. Gmail serves relevant ads using a completely automated process that enables Google to effectively target dynamically changing content, such as email. No human will read the content of your email in order to target such advertisements or other information without your consent, and no email content or other personally identifiable information will be provided to advertisers as part of the Service.

    Privacy Policy

    We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.

    Data integrity

    Google processes personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected and in accordance with this Policy or any applicable service-specific privacy notice. We review our data collection, storage and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate, complete, and current, but we depend on our users to update or correct their personal information whenever necessary.

    Can’t say I see anything that worries me…

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