Many organizations seem to use Outlook/Exchange and configure Exchange to make it difficult to use other mail clients (not enabling imap, not enabling caldav support so that a separate calendar and email client need to be used unless you use exchange, etc). Outlook is truly awful as a mail client and it would make one want to use anything else.
I've been using Outlook for 20 years or so, and I generally like it. Lots of features, some of them are borderline unique. For instance, I wonder which e-mail clients allow to create complicated rules that are then running on the mail server as opposed to that client?
The necessary conditions are (1) one needs to learn it. Too many features are making UX non-intuitive. (2) fast connection to e-mail server (3) ms exchange on the server, some features only work there.
That feature of course needs support server-side, but Thunderbird does have a Sieve add-on (in case sieve is enabled/available on the server).
I don't use it myself, since I prefer to edit the sieve filter file directly instead of using a GUI for it, but the option is there.
I prefer to right-click on e-mail and "create rule from message" from context menu. Also, the feature doesn't require any steps to configure, install or enable, it just works out of the box.
Unlike the Outlook+Exchange combination Sieve is an actual open standard (RFC 5228 & RFC 5804 & co) though that can be implemented by all mail servers and mail clients. Or is the Outlook+Exchange feature based on the same?
Looking at the sieve website it seems quite a few desktop and web mail clients do have support for it either out of the box or as an add-on. So I would say that having this functionality is more on the "common" side than "borderline unique".
Exchange rules configured through Outlook are omnipresent.
Sieve might be supported by many email clients, but is pretty much nonexistent in corporate email.
Actually, if someone points me to one hosted email provider that does support it, I'd be glad - I was wondering about trying it out but nobody supports it.
I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.
Outlook takes to long to start up in the morning. If it could start instantly I'd walk into the conference room on-time, but instead I'm several minutes late. Now that I'm working from home it needs to get the chat client started instead, but the the end result is the same, if I'm not running early I'll be late to important early morning meetings. (my early morning meetings are with India, so they will quickly assume I'm not joining at all and head to their supper - timezones are such that the best time for everyone is my breakfast and their supper)
Outlook also has been chasing the flat look fad which is against usability. Most of the others are too so it is hard to fault them, but I still wish they would have the guts to say this fad is wrong...
Once they are all running and you are used to the ui quirks they all work well enough.
>I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.
Install Thunderbird[0] and use it for a week. You'll be able to tell the difference very quickly.
I'm a Thunderbird user, but I don't really think that there's a clear winner in that comparison. Outlook has features that Thunderbird has been missing for over a decade, like reliable send-in-background (and other database operations in background unlike Thunderbird that likes to interrupt you to ask permission) and a far more mature calendar product.
>I'm a Thunderbird user, but I don't really think that there's a clear winner in that comparison. Outlook has features that Thunderbird has been missing for over a decade, like reliable send-in-background (and other database operations in background unlike Thunderbird that likes to interrupt you to ask permission) and a far more mature calendar product.
A fair point. As someone who has used both Outlook (professionally) and Thunderbird (personally) for decades (IIRC, the oldest message in my Thunderbird email store is from 1996), calendaring in Thunderbird isn't as robust as in Outlook and some of the other weaknesses you mention are absolutely valid.
However, I'd say that many of the advantages of Outlook that you mention are more related to better integration of Outlook into Exchange back ends than to the Outlook client.
If Exchange had better IMAP support and appropriate plugins for Thunderbird, Thunderbird would be vastly superior to Outlook in most respects.
As it is, Thunderbird is already vastly superior to any web-based MUA[0], including OWA[1].
I tend to really harp on send-in-background because I view it as a core feature of an MUA, but as far as I know it's still hidden behind an about:config flag in Thunderbird because it has an excessive number of known bugs, and it's been this way for many years. Another ongoing pain with Thunderbird is the inability to switch between HTML and plaintext when composing a message. Outlook lets you do this, in Thunderbird you have to copy the message, discard it, start a new one in the right mode and paste.
On the other hand, yes, Outlook Web Access is hilariously bad. It's hard to understand how Microsoft flubbed it so bad considering that their consumer outlook.com has a radically better webmail. Different teams, obviously, but you'd think they would have shared notes.
All in all, it feels a lot to me like Microsoft had a really good MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since, while Mozilla had a not-quite-done-yet MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since. Both feel bolted together out of spare parts but in a way that's subjectively a bit different.
Outlook.com and the current version of OWA in Microsoft 365 are nearly the same. What are you still missing? (If you’re on-prem still, you’re probably running a much older version)
I agree, it's the user experience I notice the least. It doesn't get in my way at all, and I don't recall it changing or if it has the changes have been so mild and consistent I haven't noticed.
