This was prompted by somehow losing a number of email address's in OE and looking for something better. A google search turned up this blog which help me decide to make the switch.
GMail vs. Outlook
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There are two programs that computer users feel very strongly about: their email client and their Web browser.
Computer users very rarely change any of these applications, and it takes more than features to overcome the inertia and sense of comfort that you have acquired after spending so many hours on either of these tools. And even though the Web browser has a very low retention threshold (except for your bookmarks and your habits, you are not putting much at risk by switching browsers), it's quite interesting to see how many people are still using the very first Web browser they started using.
The email client is even harder to switch away from, because the amount of personal email that you have accumulated over the years is not just huge, it's also extremely personal. Of course, there is also the added damage that your email address might change in the process, forcing all your friends to update their contact information for you.
With that in mind, it's not without a certain sense of excitement that I recently made the decision to switch away from Outlook to... GMail.
First of all, let me get something out of the way: since I work for Google, you might think my decision has a corporate side to it, but those of you who read my weblog regularly know that I am fairly pragmatic person when it comes to picking the most productive tools. A year ago, I wrote a comprehensive comparison between Outlook 2003 and Thunderbird where I explained my decision to prefer one over the other.
I spent these past months using both Outlook and GMail in an effort to evaluate and compare these two tools. Outlook sets the bar pretty high in terms of functionalities and convenience, but what eventually tilted the scale was my one-week vacation Hawaii last week. More about this below.
Most of the Outlook pros and cons that I listed in the article above are still completely valid (I can't find one that no longer applies, actually), so I guess that one interpretation of my switch is the realization that the drawbacks of Outlook have finally reached a point where I no longer want to tolerate them, and also because GMail has slowly gained functionalities that I considered essential. Overall, I still think that Outlook is more functional than GMail, but given the rapid pace at which GMail is evolving and the diminishing tolerance that I have for delays in my email reading, it still emerges as a winner.
There are basically three factors that eventually broke the deal for Outlook: connectivity, spam handling and synchronization.
Connectivity
As I stated in the article above, Outlook is much more powerful and seamless to use with an Exchange server than with IMAP. The IMAP support doesn't seem to have received any kind of improvement these past years (not really surprising) and not only does it lock up the interface very regularly, it's also extremely slow. In contrast, GMail is always lightning fast, even on slower lines (I regularly use in over my GPRS cell phone and the delays are barely noticeable).
Spam handling
There are many anti-spam programs available for Outlook (I reviewed some of them here) and after a few evaluations, I had settled on SpamBully for Outlook, which is very good but also very slow. As a consequence, running it on an Inbox that hasn't been updated for a week can take almost an hour. Yes, it's that slow. But it was so good that I didn't mind taking the hit. GMail's spam filter has been absolutely terrific so far.
Synchronization
I access both my personal and work emails from a lot of different places: work desktops, work laptop, home desktop, home laptop and sometimes even, from computers that I don't own. This latter option is obviously not possible if you use Outlook as your main client, but even the first four types of accesses are problematic. So far, I was dodging the issue by using Remote Desktop to log into my work machine, where my main Outlook client is always running. While Remote Desktop is an outstanding piece of software, this technique has some serious limitations, mostly because of its bandwidth-intensive nature.
Finally, there is one thing that has always been very clunky with Outlook and to which I had somehow gotten used to (or rather, resigned myself to): the address book. Despite many efforts, I have never really understood why Outlook has so many places where it stores contact information (the Address Book, Contacts and the online cache for completion). I have never been able to reconcile them or use them in a consistent manner. As a result, not only were my contacts scattered left and right in all these places, it was also maddeningly difficult to create groups of email addresses (and also keep them in sync as I make changes to the individual email addresses).
Now, there is one added benefit that completed my conversion to GMail: transparency.
In case you are not aware, you can start using GMail right now and you don't have to ask any of your friends to update their contact information for you if you don't want to. This made possible by a critical GMail feature: "From masking". You can tell GMail to display all the emails you send from GMail as coming from another email address. This is really what makes everything work so well, and it's a feature that was recently added. To configure your From address, go to Settings / Accounts / Send Mail as.
Let's see if GMail keeps its promises (and if you are curious to try it yourself, email me and I'll send you an invitation).
Just as Cedric is going to try it out, I will let you know what happens with me.
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