Outlook, and how I crawled back to Thunderbird
Friends know my old fashioned skepticism of e-mail applications that sit solely online – despite being in Silicon Valley and carrying a smartphone I just feel better knowing I can access email without an internet connection. I’ve been a Thunderbird fan for almost 5 years now because it’s lightweight and zippy nature. My address book resides here (not in Gmail, which is a pain) but I rely on Google for my calendaring – Thunderbird does not integrate calendaring like Outlook does. For BASES I was starting a contact heavy endeavor, and wanted a better way of organizing my contact list. I had heard from a friend that Outlook 2007 was good, so I tried it out.
God, what an awful experience. Outlook is a feature-rich application, but frankly I was often puzzled trying to get things done in it. There has to be 1587 some odd dialog boxes of options, but even the most straightforward, obvious things were overlooked. I found that I could change precisely how new mail subject line in my reading list was to be formatted, yet almost no options for choosing how I’d want mail to look while reading them. Contacts cannot be easily placed in multiple groups because of a folder-approach to organization. One can assign multiple categories to a contact, but when addressing an email you cannot sort or choose categories, making this organizing method useless. Auto-complete of names when writing emails doesn’t kick in until you manually select the person from the address book (thunderbird’s works immediately). Using Google’s calendar sync, I’m only allowed to setup 2-way syncing with my primary Google calendar. So either I enjoy color differentiation of events on Outlook or Google, but not both. Outlook uses the ‘star this email’ feature seen on Gmail as a way of auto-generating a “To Do” list, but this isn’t how I’ve used the ‘star’ feature. When I click on Tasks in Outlook, the program lags for as much as 20 seconds as it tries to process the 8000 odd messages I’ve got in my folder. I cannot disable this ‘feature’. The new mail notification often refuses to disappear despite there being no new mail.
What a trainwreck. Frustrated, I installed Thunderbird with the Lightning calendaring add-on plus a plug-in that claims to do Google Calendar sync. In about 10 minutes, I had 2-way sync working with all my calendars. Even with five IMAP e-mail accounts set-up, Thunderbird remains zippy, where as M$ says that mailboxes greater than 500MB will experience problems. I’m approaching 3.5GB of mail….
So a word of caution to those who haven’t migrated to Gmail’s web interface: hold off on Outlook unless you’ve got many hours to burn.
Joey Said,
January 16, 2009 @ 1:15 am
Wow, you and I must be kindred spirits in the calendaring world because I installed Lightning AND the Google Calendar sync on the exact same day! I also got myself an account at NuevaSync that automagically creates an Exchange server for my Google Calendar that I can push to my iPhone.
A few months ago Thunderbird stopped loading correctly because I had too many messages. This lead to a very mediocre three months with Outlook (although Xobni made it somewhat bearable). Turns out that even though Thunderbird was unresponsive I could still compress my inboxes. Two minutes later it’s running like new again. See ya Outlook!
Saket Said,
January 16, 2009 @ 1:19 am
hey! thanks for the comment. :)
d’oh, i should have taken the time to explore Xobni cause i’ve heard so much about them.
seeing/hearing “automagically” always makes me smile. i feel that the more ‘education’ i seem to get, the more ‘automagically’ seems the most appropriate word to describe what i see.
Greg Said,
January 17, 2009 @ 8:19 am
I have to say that now that I am in the working world, Outlook has become a much better option. Its integration with exchange (and Google Calendar sync) make it an invaluable tool. Without it, there is no real option for meeting invitations and calendaring.
Saket Vora » Email Views and Thread Arcs Said,
March 1, 2009 @ 10:19 pm
[...] – I spent some time searching around for alternative solutions. I tried Outlook 2007 and that was a disaster. I came across an IBM Research project called Remail which explored a new way of interacting with [...]