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Comment by jkahn | Hacker News Reader

Don't write off Outlook without a second thought. It's big with loads of features, yes - but that's what's good about it.

If all you need to do is plain text email, sure, Mutt is fine. If you deal with a large amount of email, calendar appointments, tasks, contacts, etc, in a professional role, nothing beats Outlook.

There's a reason it's so popular.

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The issue is, that Outlook sends crappy emails in the default setting. And since nobody changes those everybody is sending crappy emails. Also, we are talking about email. Maybe it is good for an address book, calendar, tasks, etc. pp. But as an email client it is awful, also because it is as complicated as mutt but actually less powerful.

My biggest complained about Outlook is actually a bug in their HTML engine. From Outlook 14:

> font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";

What's the issue here? Simple, if Calibri isn't there, my browser looks for a font called "sans-serif" and doesn't use the default sans-serif font, the result the email is presented in a serif font. Correctly, it should look like this:

> font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;

I know this is nit-picking but for me it is annoying.

This is baffling. How could something as important as font rendering not be fixed?

Probably because everyone at MS uses MS products and they all have calibri installed...

Equally baffling is that quotes, which should simply demarcate regions within which special characters are ignored, have special semantic meaning to a CSS parser.

That narrative, however, isn't one for which we can blame Microsoft.

I don't agree, one is a string, the other is a symbol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_(programming)

They don't have special semantic meaning to CSS the spec. Quotes are needed[0] only if the <family-name> value has whitespace in it.

0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/font-family#Va...

They have special meaning since "generic family names (...) must not be quoted".

Going from one job using a "startup-y" Gmail company account to another job using a "corporate-y" Outlook solution was a tough transition. Outlook has loads of features, but the UI simplicity (relatively speaking) of Gmail makes most of them unnecessary in the first place, plus it was a little less frustrating to use. Meanwhile, Gmail still had calendar events, reminders, google drive integration, etc. in ways that seem on-par with features in Outlook.

Disclaimer: I'm not a PM/executive who has to juggle meetings and communication all day, so maybe I just ask less of email.

Edit: clarity

I use emacs with notmuch for my email. I have never found anything better, and yes I've used Outlook.

Searching with notmuch is blazing fast and works better than gmail search.

HTML email is handled by w3m. The new "eww" would probably work also but I haven't tried that yet.

It's possible to send HTML email by writing in org-mode markup, but I haven't done that either. If people can inflict their HTML email on me, they can deal with my plain-text replies.

Well, that's your opinion. Support that garbage like I do at work, and your opinion will change.

Again, popular does not mean good to me. That is the point. I have seen Outlook peg processors and waste disk IO with all those features.

I hate cloud services, but they keep such things minimal and some of us pray for mandates of no-fat client email, even to spite myself, because of Outlook and Thunderbird users.

> I hate cloud services, but they keep such things minimal

Have you tried Google's Inbox on an underpowered Linux box? It's horrendously slow, in my experience. Gmail is fine though. Some web based software is really good, but others can definitely be a CPU hog.

unfortunatly Outlook 2013-2016 is pretty akward (resources) but I like Outlook 2010. Still I don't use it

I've never had an installation of Outlook that stayed stable and usable for more than about six months. It doesn't help that you have other parts of Office that stick their grubby fingers in your address books, calendars, and mail files and do their best to scramble things up.

I don't know what you're doing with it, but I've used Outlook for 2 multinational companies for 4+ years each, had several GB of mails for each (probably hundreds of thousands of email per account, most of them automated), and the worst parts of it were a bug with password resets (it keps asking for my password for about a week after quarterly resets) and the slowness of filter sync with Exchange.

As you can see, those were nuisances. Otherwise, it was pretty much rock solid.

Several versions, ran them under XP and Windows 7.

Lync/Skype for Business tends to play havoc with Outlook data files, I've found.

I get around 400 mails per day and over several years Outlook has not failed. Exchange environment.

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