I’ve used eM client for years but it’s become impossibly buggy and their customer service is worse than useless. I’m dropping them.
I prefer to have my mail offline.
What do you guys use? Is Outlook decent for someone who doesn’t use the MS office suite of programs?
I’ve used the whole MS suite, including Outlook, for decades. And use Outlook’s offline features and offline storage all the time.
Now as a retiree, I use Outlook continuously, Excel once a month, and other apps of Office ~once a year. Can recommend Outlook as a complete email, calendaring, contact, and task manager.
The term “Outlook” is ambiguous in this context because it can refer to any of three different products – the free online service Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail), the Outlook product from the Office 365 subscription service, or the Outlook product from the traditional Microsoft Office suite.
I still use the traditional version of Microsoft Office and for many years Outlook was my email client of choice. But I had to move away from it because it’s an old version of Office and Outlook didn’t support the newer security protocols, specifically Oauth 2.0. The newer versions do, though in MS Office 2021 Oauth 2.0 is only supported for IMAP, not POP3, not sure about Office 2024 or 365.
In any case, I wasn’t about to pay for a whole new version of Office just for Outlook, so I switched to Thunderbird. After a period of adjustment and a bunch of configuration changes I’m quite happy with it. It’s quite impressive for a free product, and it can be made to look and work remarkably similar to Outlook. There’s an old thread somewhere where I was getting help on some of the necessary configuration changes.
I’ve been using Thunderbird for several decades and am completely satisfied with it. I have it configured to access my mail server via IMAP and store all saved mail in local folders. It works fine.
^same here.
There’s even a fourth app that’s also called Outlook, the stand-alone email app that comes with Windows 11.
Another vote for Thunderbird. I only use it at work and only for a single email account (my own (work’s) domain but it goes through gmail).
If my email had been handled through gmail from the beginning that’s probably what I’d use, and be used to. However, when it was first set up, before I migrated it to gmail I needed a client and found Thunderbird. And I dislike gmail’s UI so Thunderbird continues to work for me.
At home, I just access my various accounts (yahoo, aol, and to a lesser extent, gmail) via a browser.
For working with offline mail, Outlook and Thunderbird are really the only viable options. I use Outlook classic because I despise the new Outlook interface. I also keep a local archive of my email and the new Outlook doesn’t play very nicely with PST files.
While paying for 365 is unpleasant, I still do it even though I already have a work license because of the 1TB of Onedrive storage, which I use to keep my music archive backed up to the cloud. They raised the price last year because of the Copilot features (which I never use) but it’s still a reasonable price to pay for that much cloud storage, so I didn’t cancel.
I used web mail (gmail, hotmail, etc.) in a browser. That way, it’s always synced across all my devices. I had problems years ago with an offline product (maybe Thunderbird?) keeping everything synced up, so I gave up. Probably better these days, but I don’t understand what the downside to web mail is, I guess.
I use Thunderbird and have for many years. To me, it does the best job of managing my business account, my GMail account, my Outlook account, and my five ISP accounts in a single program. It can be a bit tricky to configure, but it also has the ability to change the configuration and performance substantially when you need to (e.g., to adjust the IP timeout when you have a mail server that sometimes doesn’t respond as quickly as you like). Some of the plug-ins are pretty cool, too.
I began installing Outlook but was repelled by all the hoops Microsoft wanted me to jump through, and the invasive integration they demanded. So I installed Thunderbird. The auto configuration didn’t work with my ancient Roadrunner email account but a quick visit to google gave me the info I needed for a quick and easy manual configuration.
Thanks everybody, I appreciate your input.
Just a preference. I don’t like any of my important documents, emails, etc. to exist only in the cloud.
On the other hand, having my email and other documents in the cloud means that they’re accessible from multiple devices and from any location. So I prefer it.
And I don’t like them to exist only on my PC.
Which is why I have them both places.
For me the downside is I hate using a clunky browser for what’s supposed to be a fully featured app. And that I can’t refer to any of my email when offline.
Same here (except I’m not a retiree). I have the Office suite, as part of the M365 package. I actually have a subscription mostly so that I can take advantage of OneDrive backups. Since I use Windows, it works pretty smoothly to back up documents and photos from folders I’ve indicated. (Yes, I know that some people have had real problems with OneDrive, for whatever reason I do not.)
Anyway, Office comes with that. Excel is something I rarely touch. I use Word more often, though not constantly. The only program I use regularly, as in every single day, is Outlook. It is always open on my PC.
I have used Thunderbird in the past, and in fact I used it for many years. Thunderbird and Firefox both. I’ve moved on from both products, as I found them way too clunky. Also, there was a time when I could not stand Internet Explorer or Outlook, and the original version of Edge was also awful. But Microsoft improved their products, and now Outlook and Edge are my primary applications for email and web browsing.
I keep copies of all my PC-contained emails in two separate USB drives. Easy to do with a desktop EM program. With three identical physical copies I’ve never needed for them to be in the cloud.
Yes.
But there’s no right or wrong about it, just personal preferences.
100%. This is totally true. Everyone has different experiences and preferences, and I never tell anyone that what they like to use is “wrong”. And my opinion of what I prefer has evolved over the years quite a bit, as operating systems and applications (and the internet itself) have also evolved.
And when your residence is flooded or swept away or burns down?
Clouds are awesome 99.999999% backups. Anything you or I could replicate is amatuer hour by comparison.
But as you say, there’s no single right answer. There certainly are a vast array of objectively wrong answers. But also plenty of plenty good enough ones to allow for lotsa individual preference and variation.
I have to third or ninth or whatever Thunderbird. The problem is that no single email client is going to work perfectly for everyone, and no software that complex is going to be bug or annoyance free.
To me, the biggest advantage of Thunderbird (aside from being free and open source) is that it is a local client that communicates between your computer and your mail server. Many modern email clients and almost all mobile email clients work using an intermediate cloud server that the email client’s creator owns, and it sits between the mail client and your mail server. Yet one more possibly weak link to get to the crown jewels of your email.
This is how some versions of Outlook access non-Microsoft IMAP based servers.
I use Thunderbird on Linux, Android, Mac, and have used it on Windows. I’m waiting for the IOS/ipadOS client. I still mostly hate it, but I’ve not found anything better.
And that ladies and gentlemen, is what constitutes a ringing endorsement here in the enshittified year 2026.
Not disputing your tech contentions, just making social commentary. 
Once upon a time, as part of an old IT job role I was in charge of handling data backups for multiple sites… I think around 20 different offices spread across much of the western US and also Hawaii, American Samoa, and Guam. Our backups were all tape-based, because 20 years ago the robust cloud solutions available today weren’t around, or at least weren’t well-developed. You could do online backups, that was already a thing, but internet connections weren’t quite fast enough to really support that as a regular thing. At least not for my organization (and we weren’t some rinky-dink little company; we had over 40,000 employees spread across every continent except Antarctica).
Anyway, we would do a nightly backup, kept locally, a weekly backup, kept offsite but not too far away, and monthly/annual backups kept in a storage facility managed by Iron Mountain. If we were hit by a nuclear blast, we would still not lose all of our data. It was just a matter of how far back you would have to restore from depending on how severe and widespread a disaster might have been.
In my time doing all that, the worst thing we had to deal with was a server hard drive failure in our Honolulu office, and we only lost a day’s worth of data, as we were able to restore from the nightly backup. If there was something more devastating, like, say, a tsunami that destroyed the entire city, we’d maybe have lost a few weeks of data.
If you are careful, you can use redundancy to make physical backups pretty safe. But today I prefer to take advantage of the kind of cloud solutions I didn’t have back then. If my own PC were to be completely destroyed, I wouldn’t lose any of my most important files, as long as Microsoft’s servers are also intact. And I expect they are extra careful with security and redundancy (they can certainly afford that more than they can afford the bad publicity of failure).