
If there’s one thing Microsoft is better at than Apple, it’s… email. - mgcreed
http://thenextweb.com/2009/09/16/microsoft-apple-email/
======
rbanffy
It is entirely plausible Mail.app is not the greatest e-mail client ever, but
the Outlook/Exchange combination is the absolute worst e-mail solution ever
conceived.

It's unreliable, expensive, limited, slow, heavy and each and every attribute
I don't want in an e-mail solution.

I can't count the number of companies that make people take messages off their
mail server and put them in local stores just because the Exchange server
cannot reliably manage terabytes of messages and their attachments. Just
imagine the nightmare it would be (because nobody does it) to do any kind of
analysis on this mess. It's nearly impossible.

~~~
philwelch
"... the Outlook/Exchange combination is the absolute worst e-mail solution
ever conceived"

Have you used Lotus Notes?

~~~
philwelch
A lot of folks seem to have modded this up, taking it as a rhetorical
question. But I'm serious. Lotus Notes seems to have fairly reliable large-
scale server-side storage, but the user interface is crap. The Outlook UI is a
lot better (actually, a lot better than many mail UI's...) but I don't know
much about the Exchange backend.

~~~
rbanffy
In one word: "horrible".

As for Outlook, it seems to be a de facto standard mail clients try to
emulate. I would much rather use a Gmail-is interface. Labels are a much
better idea than folders.

------
philwelch
Complaint boils down to:

1\. Apple Mail is bad at working with Exchange. Probably true.

2\. "Apple Mail “expands” document attachments inline or places icons anywhere
within the body of emails. The only way to stop this ugly behavior is to
switch to plain text mode." If Mail's display of expanded attachments is the
_only_ thing that bothers you about receiving HTML email, count yourself
lucky.

3\. Address Book and iCal are separate apps. I welcome this--Mail is too
bloated already even without them--though they are thin on features as she
points out. Other than that, I think separating these apps while allowing
their databases to talk to each other is one place where Apple really got the
Unix way and updated it to the GUI era. Each application does one thing, but
they can interoperate.

~~~
pyre
I didn't see much of a complaint about iCal and AddressBook being separate
apps. I saw the major complaints being lack of features in the separated apps.

~~~
philwelch
He started by complaining about them being separate apps, as if to complain
that Address Book's low feature set was a consequence of it being its own
independent app. While some more specifics would have been nice, the context
implied that the lack of features came from them being separate apps--which
doesn't give enough credit to how their data is integrated, and to the
advantages of this approach.

------
jsz0
"reducing an essential tool as a contact manager down to adding, search and
editing capabilities with absolutely no options for view customization,
filtering, categorization etc."

Is this actually true? I'm not familiar with Outlook or Entourage but the
things you want to do seem entirely possible in Mail:

You filter with the search box. You categorize with groups You can add any
custom fields to contacts You can add general purpose notes to contacts

~~~
pyre
The author probably didn't realize that lists existed because (iirc) by
default AddressBook doesn't show your the 'tiered' view with the different
groups. I think that by default it shows you a single AddressBook entry at a
time (with the 'next/prev' arrows to navigate through search results).

------
blhack
The problem is that the apple version doesn't say "Microsoft" at the top.

I know, this is a stupid joke, but I'm only half kidding. A coworker stormed
into my office today _livid_ because he needed _microsoft_ office, not _open_
office.

"It's free! It's SHIT!", he screamed while throwing his hands into the air.

I walked into his department and had him show me, on one of the other machines
(which had MS office installed) what he was trying to do.

I then walked over to his machine and pressed LITERALLY the exact same series
of menus and buttons to get EXACTLY the same result. (it was excel vs OO.o
calc).

He had never even tried.

Perhaps I should start lying to my users and telling them that Open Office
costs $1000 per seat. I bet they would beg me for it then.

As far as mail clients go. Get thunderbird and stop even thinking about the
fact that you're using a mail client.

------
dgallagher
Outlook was always too busy for me. It was almost designed for people who want
to spend their day "living" inside of email and calendar appointments. Ever
click on the Journal by accident and get a wizard to set it up? New emails
greet you with a "click me" pop-up notification including preview text, a
sound, and a little "new mail" icon by your clock. It's like the most
important thing you should do right now is stop whatever you're working on and
read the new message; mental death for anyone attempting to concentrate on
something.

I know you can shut this all off and make Outlook quieter, but sometimes
coworkers and bosses don't like this. "Did you get the email I just sent you
30 seconds ago?" The thing that bugs me about Outlook more than anything is
that its incessant ADD can affect an entire organization and trickle into its
blood. It takes a group of rebels to fight against it.

This isn't really an issue if you're job is reactive. Customer support, IT
getting an email alert that a server just went down, etc... Then Outlook can
be really helpful so long as you know how to "tame the beast" with email
rules.

Exchange is a nice piece of tech (albeit a bit of a pain to setup and
configure from an IT's perspective - I've done several builds myself). It
"tightly" integrates with Outlook in a properly-configured Active Directory
environment. For corporate-hosted email, the Outlook/Exchange combo is pretty
tough to beat if you have the cash for it.*

In non-corporate land, however, I'm in love with Mail.app. It's so simple and
basic. Far less annoying than Outlook. There still are new-mail notifications
(easily turned off), though they're less tempting to click on as you don't get
a mini-message preview as with Outlook. Search is MILLIONS of times better
than Outlook.

I think it comes down to a matter of taste and work habits. Some people live
and die by Outlook. Others like myself are just plain sick of it for a list of
reasons and like something else. It's like OS-wars. Just pick whatever makes
you happiest and stick to it. Don't tell others what they should be using or
how they should be using it, etc... :)

*If anyone has any experience using Mac OS X Server's mail server and Mail.app, compared to Exchange/Outlook, please share!

~~~
tomjen2
I configured Thunderbird to alert me to all incoming emails by showing a
preview window (no sound), which I can then very quickly scan to see if the
email is important (I had several near miss emails from my university, but, as
a student, I can't tell them not not send me urgent email).

------
siong1987
Off the topic:

Do you all find that the toolbar that sticks at the bottom of the webpage is
really annoying?

~~~
GHFigs
I found that it fit in the the generally annoying motif of the page.
Particularly egregious is _the scraping and reposting of this very comment
thread_.

Dear authors of "thenextweb.com": You do not have permission to post this
comment on your site.

~~~
nomoresecrets
And there is your comment now, right on their site :-)

------
cschep
Forgive me, but I'm hoping there are a lot of nerdy Mail.app users in this
thread...

Does anyone here that uses Mail.app and has it sync up only the last month, or
couple months of mail? Or even the last..50 or 100 messages like the iPhone
client? I'd really like to use it as my mail client, but I have no interest or
need in having my entire gmail account synced on my laptop. I suppose it
doesn't really matter if I have a couple gigs of wasted space, but I don't
know why I should have to carry it around if I don't need it.

Seems like it should be easy? It's available on the iPhone client.

Any ideas?

~~~
btn
There isn't a comparable feature in Mail.app.

If you turn on the "Advanced IMAP Controls" labs feature in gmail, you can
switch off the labels that will give you the most trouble. You can do this
with "All Mail" and "deleting" messages from your inbox will still archive
them in there: <http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78755>

~~~
cschep
Thanks for the reply, that's too bad that it doesn't exist, but I appreciate
knowing now instead of looking for it all the time. :)

------
nopassrecover
It depends on your definition of better. I can't comment on Apple's offering
but I suspect your definition of better is feature based.

Exchange has a lot of promise (easy server and user integration, if you use
small business server it's an easy setup, if you use a standard win server god
help you) but it's features are incredibly poorly limited, the performance is
horrendous and it's missing lots of basics. I truly have no idea how the money
and brains that must be behing Exchange could have so poorly tested the system
for usability and real-world use.

Outlook again is better than any other email interface I've used.
Customisation and filtering and stuff can be a pain and have their limits, and
there are some general problem but overall it's not that bad. But one thing
that is bad again is its performance - it's terrible! With Xobni, search isn't
such a problem (even instant outlook search can be slow) but just opening an
email, and eventually the interface is an experience in frustration unparalled
for the average user.

------
jacquesm
If the criterion here is the number of messages sent out by windows machines
then this is a definite yes. Unfortunately the users of those machines have
not much to do with the messages being sent.

Re. the rest of the article, anything attached to emails of that size will get
the sender a nice bill from me with a reminder that sending email with 3Mb
attachment might end up on a mobile phone.

It won't be a very friendly reminder.

Send me a link where I can get the file (and a password if you feel that it is
precious stuff).

~~~
kwantam
Regardless of your personal taste on the matter (with which I am admittedly
sympathetic), the fact that the software _fails_ to support it---and in
particular, fails to the exclusion of other mail!---is inexcusable. "Can't
send messages large enough to annoy you" is obviously not an intended feature;
it's just extremely poor software.

Whether any of us like it or not, in most office environments large email
attachments have become part of the landscape, and Apple seemingly doesn't
care. I can't bring myself to believe that this could have slipped past QA,
which leads me to believe that someone made a conscious decision to ship
software with a feature most would take for granted in an unusable state.

My goodness, it almost seems like I'm turning into an Apple detractor. I
assure you, I do not intend it! Poor software design is equally repugnant
whether it comes from Redmond, 1 Infinite Loop, or RMS. That the poor design
in question happens to satisfy your or my proclivities with respect to
attachment sizing isn't really relevant.

~~~
thejay
Except when it's probably not Mail's fault.

I've never encountered such problems despite having sent 100mb+ email
attachments from Mail before. I've just tried sending a 35mb email attachment
to myself (other email account) and sure enough it was sent without a hitch.

Maybe instead of having the urge to whine how about just chill and dig deeper.

~~~
pyre
He (article author) was specifically talking about Mail.app + MS Exchange
interaction, not a generic 'send an email using any old email provider.'

