If there’s one thing Microsoft is better at than Apple, it’s… email.

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

Complaint boils down to:<p>1. Apple Mail is bad at working with Exchange. Probably true.<p>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 <i>only</i> thing that bothers you about receiving HTML email, count yourself lucky.<p>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.

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

The problem is that the apple version doesn't say "Microsoft" at the top.<p>I know, this is a stupid joke, but I'm only half kidding. A coworker stormed into my office today <i>livid</i> because he needed <i>microsoft</i> office, not <i>open</i> office.<p>"It's free! It's SHIT!", he screamed while throwing his hands into the air.<p>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.<p>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).<p>He had never even tried.<p>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.<p>As far as mail clients go. Get thunderbird and stop even thinking about the fact that you're using a mail client.

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

Off the topic:<p>Do you all find that the toolbar that sticks at the bottom of the webpage is really annoying?

Forgive me, but I'm hoping there are a lot of nerdy Mail.app users in this thread...<p>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.<p>Seems like it should be easy? It's available on the iPhone client.<p>Any ideas?

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>It won't be a very friendly reminder.<p>Send me a link where I can get the file (and a password if you feel that it is precious stuff).