First of all, to avoid any misunderstanding - I don’t want to use Eudora, or Pine, or Opera mail or any other email programs.
I have been using Outlook Express for years. I like it, it’s easy, and I have never had any viruses from using it. I recently purchased Offce 2003 Pro for school and Outlook comes with it. I was thinking about switching to Outlook, but it looks so complicated and the features are hard to figure out.
What are the benefits to Outlook? Since my software was a discount, purchased through my school, I didn’t get any manuals or printed things with it.
If you use Outlook, what are your favorite features? Any you can’t live without? What neat, geeky things can I do with Outlook?
The functionality of Outlook for mail is similar to Outlook Express, but it’s more than just an e-mail program. It can also function as a browser (though I don’t use it as such), but I’ve found the main advantage it has over Express is its expanded capability for tracking dates, appointments, tasks, reminders, and contacts. I often use it to schedule reminders for various tasks. Obviously, if you’re only looking for an e-mail client, Express works just as well.
Outlook comes into its own when it is used organization-wide to do stuff like schedule meetings and check other user’s calendars and so forth. Absent that, it’s a glorified Daytimer.
It’s a fine daytimer IMO, and I use it so much I cannot imagine not using it.
One neat thing: You can download a program from Yahoo to synch up your Outlook contacts, appts, and even notes to your free Yahoo account, so it’s all available online and backed-up.
Outlook/Express is bad not because of a lack of features but because of its poor security and its OS integration. You get a virus through IE (or Outlook, as is occasionally the case), and the virus mails out copies of itself by using Outlook (and often draws new addresses from the Outlook address book). Malware is generally written to exploit known weaknesses in Internet Explorer and Outlook. THIS is the reason that computer geeks tell others not to use IE and Outlook.
Having an automatic virus-scanning program always running takes a lot of this risk out, but (if you are not inclined to browse tech news sites on a regular basis) one might still set their homepage to the anti-virus software company’s product home page, to learn when new nastiness is found and updates are necessary.
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