Is it really that bad?
I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.
I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.
Outlook also has been chasing the flat look fad which is against usability. Most of the others are too so it is hard to fault them, but I still wish they would have the guts to say this fad is wrong...
Once they are all running and you are used to the ui quirks they all work well enough.
I've used Outlook in several organisations over the years, and start time has always been in the order of 5-10s.
Install Thunderbird[0] and use it for a week. You'll be able to tell the difference very quickly.
A fair point. As someone who has used both Outlook (professionally) and Thunderbird (personally) for decades (IIRC, the oldest message in my Thunderbird email store is from 1996), calendaring in Thunderbird isn't as robust as in Outlook and some of the other weaknesses you mention are absolutely valid.
However, I'd say that many of the advantages of Outlook that you mention are more related to better integration of Outlook into Exchange back ends than to the Outlook client.
If Exchange had better IMAP support and appropriate plugins for Thunderbird, Thunderbird would be vastly superior to Outlook in most respects.
As it is, Thunderbird is already vastly superior to any web-based MUA[0], including OWA[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web
Edit: Clarified Outlook/Exchange integration vs. Outlook as client.
On the other hand, yes, Outlook Web Access is hilariously bad. It's hard to understand how Microsoft flubbed it so bad considering that their consumer outlook.com has a radically better webmail. Different teams, obviously, but you'd think they would have shared notes.
All in all, it feels a lot to me like Microsoft had a really good MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since, while Mozilla had a not-quite-done-yet MUA in 2003 and hasn't done much with it since. Both feel bolted together out of spare parts but in a way that's subjectively a bit different.