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Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it.

Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space.

If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace.

If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it.

I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is blah. very blah.

But it gets the job done, and I hate it a little less than the alternatives.

I did get Mutt up and running last week, Oh what joy it was to get it to integrate with Gmail.

I will say that if your macOS based MailMate is the best mail client for me.

Sadly I am often on the Windows end of things.

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> Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive

As a programmer, if I could eliminate email at work altogether, it’d have a net benefit to my productivity.

I would kill for something that merged Teams and email into a single flow of messages and responses in multiple subjects and threads.

I still miss my BlackBerry 10 messaging merging email, SMS, BBM…

You know, Gmail does let you search chat messages too. I thi k it's is:chat. Maybe is:chat OR in:inbox would get you halfway there?

Yes, but it's not in the same stream. And nobody I know or work with uses Google Chat (or whatever the name is now)

Way back IIRC Google Talk message threads would show up right in your inbox.

This sounds awful I hate teams and try to never use it

I did like BBM BB on Android “hub” was horrid

I actually liked it. Even paid for it when by BB10 DevAlpha died.

I prefer the asynchronous nature of email. I can close my email client when I need to focus properly on something.

When I need a break, I can go get another mug of coffee, open the email client, and work my way through it.

This is far preferable to instant messages popping up at random times and distract me from my focus.

Of course, I can just close the IM app as well, but there is an expectation that I have to respond to an IM promptly, and not responding is far more likely to cause a problem.

After all, if it was not deemed urgent by the sender it could have been an email message instead. Of course, a lot of people just use whatever IM there is entirely instead of email removing the asynchronous option entirely,.

Nothing is perfect. You will still have people who send you an email. Then two minutes later show up, tapping you on the shoulder and asking if you saw that email they just sent.

All that is made worse by everyone sitting on tables in a giant warehouse.

With cubes, there was a slightly bigger threshold, for physically disturbing someone.

With an office and a closed door, the threshold is substantial.

Thunderbird does what it says on the box. It just works. It can also now talk to Exchange servers.

> If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive

What does that mean in more detail? I only have typical corpo Outlook experience, and I find it passable at the best of times. Not even necessarily as the fault of Outlook.

It means you can get through 300 emails in 1/10 the time as you can in Gmail. Outlook’s layout and software is FAST.

Once it goes web or “new” it’s a laggy piece of crap, still maybe not as bad as g suite though

> Outlook’s layout and software is FAST.

?????

Updating mailboxes takes forever. Wrangling a significant number of mails takes forever, but notably it at least finishes, much unlike in the new, web based version. Opening links takes forever. Randomly loses connection to the server which it cannot reestablish without a restart.

Are we talking about the same Outlook? It's also a bog standard email client, I cannot even hope to imagine what you find different on its layout.

Outlook "classic" is an Exchange client first an email client second. [1]

A lot of speed depends on corporate setup, so I'll skip that.

But integration, end to end, over core groupware elements like emails, distribution lists, calendars, contacts, etc is something nothing else does as well in my experience - though 3rd party components differ in quality (both of the solutions and how they got deployed)

I can mimic or even do better on personal scale but group level? Nothing comes close, if only because they end up connecting disparate data sources with disparate protocols and everything gets a slight case of Chinese whispers or desynchronization (sure, you can reliably send ICS files as invitations, but they don't synchronize, etc)

[1] a particularly funny aspect of this is that Outlook and Exchange do not support HTML Email directly - they have to wrap it in RTF, despite there existing a MAPI datatype for HTML content - if you use it, the MAPI library literally crashes opening the mail store.

In my experience this means network effects. Microsoft has been very successful in pushing its entire stack at enterprises, and there’s a benefit to knowing that everyone in the org has the same tools and will actually use them. Like, I can send someone docx in an email and can expect that anyone can open and edit it with instruction.

“Most people can get an email and open a document without instruction” may seem like a low bar to you, but in my experience with run of the mill enterprise it’s massively better than the alternatives.

Also, Outlook as a whole is inarguably bloated, but it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails.

The biggest integration I can think of is the calendar and the reaction emojis on emails. Previewing Office documents I don't really do, but that sounds fairly trivial as well.

> it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails

There must be a tremendous difference between consumer and business gmail then, cause I'm honestly unable to imagine this. Outlook is generally not fast, and will reliably choke when wrangling an appreciable amount of mails (a few thousand or more).

I've been rocking Evolution for around 10 years now. We migrated from GroupWise at my little firm to Exchange a few years before that.

I mostly look after the mail systems myself because no one else really seems to give a shit! Provided it carries on working. We have been all in on prem for a good 25 years now and I run a separate Exim n Dovecot with rspamd setup for a few vanity domains.

Evo just works. It does have a fair few quirks of its own but nothing as nasty as Outlook. I doubt it will be too popular here - it only runs on Linux.

I've worked in places with both. I always have my own notes/planner system using text files. Being able to use weblinks to reference emails is a killer feature of even the most ascetic web client. My outlook messages always got lost in the sauce even with folders. (And searching in Outlook was always bad for some reason.)

Does MailMate work well with Office 365 accounts? And how does it compare to the stock Mail app? The screenshots I could find look pretty similar.

I use Outlook for Mac at home and for Window at work. It's ironic that the Mac version is so much nicer than the Windows version. The Windows version feels like a wrapper around outlook.live.com.

It is unless you use old/legacy outlook. The “new” outlook is electron/webapp

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