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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

Outlook is pretty good at everything else but email

Unfortunately that always happens when someone has the dominant market position. If you look at last generation's email leader (Lotus Notes) they were lazy and terrible until someone else came along who did it better (namely Microsoft).

Now Lotus Notes is dead. Exchange/Outlook at the current front runners, and they are producing really lazy email clients and not really pushing email forward at all.

What can be done? No clue. The only organisation seemingly able to compete with Microsoft in this arena is Google with their Google Apps for business/education offering. But that has its own issues.

At least Microsoft has made "Outlook Online" a lot better in recent years thanks to their push for Office 365 Subscriptions.

PS - Search in Outlook is shockingly terrible. For some reason during the Vista era someone at Microsoft said: "Let's make search terrible in all of our products." So Vista's search was junk (read: replace a nice Windows 95 search sidebar with hidden obscure magic keywords which didn't work, and only index "known" file types (which is none)) and that filtered down to Outlook which got a huge bloated indexer which is inconsistent, slow, and still relies on magic keywords to accomplish anything. PPS - Thunderbird also has a terrible search indexer, however it also offers simple filtering which is wonderful. You can disable what they call their "global indexer" (which you should, it sucks) and then just use the "quick search" box within each folder, it is insanely quick, and the filtering options offered a huge efficiency gain.

Yea, I read that Windows Search 3.0 was part of why Vista was so slow. 4.0 improved the performance though.

I actually find the search plenty fast, and I'm always very happy with the incredibly low memory requirements for Outlook...

Win 7 & 8, Outlook 2007 & 2010, respectively. FWIW.

Outlook search really is awful. I find it easer to find items by visual inspection.

Outlook is really great at (Exchange) email. I just started at a place with Notes. In the 18 years since the last time I'd had to suffer with Notes for email, I cannot identify a single improvement.

It's a terrible email client but it's better than the rest of them.

The PST file fuckery is the one thing I wish it handled differntly. After that it would be the mess of things caused by 'borrowing' from Word/IE when it comes to composing and viewing emails.

I used to use an old Windows program some time ago. That was the best email client, I ever used. It was never topped by any other. To sad, that it is no longer supported and runs only on Windows.

It seems to me, that nobody really can write a real good eMail clients.

Its shit at those things as well. Months of VSTO and Outlook forms will make you realise it's a pile of crap.

I believe Outlook is still using Word to render HTML content in emails as well.

Which is ridiculous but strikes me to be done so as to ensure that emails prepared in MS Word render correctly in Outlook?

Of course they could fix MS Word's HTML output and fix Outlook to use MSIE's rendering engine ... but that'd only reduce lockin by allowing Outlook users emails to be read properly in other MUA. Never going to happen.

What is funny is that Word 2013 can be configured to generate pages that even MS's own IE10 won't render properly by default.

HTML content in emails is the real WTF. I wonder why no-one ever invented a nice markup format for email? Probably because the only type of person qualified to do that wouldn't be seen dead sending non-plain-text email.

Like text/enriched[0]? Though I guess it might not count as "nice"

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text

The compose window of Outlook is WinWord. Outlook (up to 2003) used Trident (Internet Explorer engine) to show HTML-mails. Nowadays Outlook HTML view is powered by Word layout engine as well (for security reasons, as MS said). It cannot handle many CSS style elements, background color and is stuck with HTML 4.

The compose window of Outlook is WinWord.

I believe up to 2003 this was an option that was not enabled by default too.

Outlook 97-2013 use Word for the compose window. It's not an option, it's how it works behind the scene (Win32 COM components).

e.g. an known Outlook 2010 bug (with Exchange 2013) crash the Outlook client on startup. But you can still open *.msg files, it opens the mail in a window and one can edit the mail.

It's all about Bill Gates vision "information at your fingertips" from the early nineties and the Cairo operating system.

Watch this video from Bill Gates Comdex '90: http://youtu.be/kL8zoQVJaD8?t=19m26s

Cairo '91-'96: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_operating_system

Outlook 97-2003 has it as an option, 2007+ don't. And BTW the Outlook 97-2003 and 2007+ implementations of this feature are different too (MS split most of Word into wwlib.dll in Word 2007).

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