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

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

thenextweb.com

16 pointsmgcreed29 comments

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.

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

Have you used Lotus Notes?

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.

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.

"Just imagine the nightmare it would be (because nobody does it) to do any kind of analysis on this mess. It's nearly impossible."

This is actually what we write software to do at my day job.

We work in the electronic discovery/computer forensics industry. Parsing and analyzing multi-terabyte collections of Outlook PSTs (and NSFs, and whatever other file type you can imagine), to be reviewed by lawyers and corporate attorneys as evidence in litigation, is one of our core service offerings.

I am sorry. I never intended to deny your industry's existence.

What I wanted to say is that nobody does it without a court order because it is the closest thing to hell corporate e-mail management can conjure.

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.

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.

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.

Apple mail actually works really well with exchange 07 now since it uses exchange web services that replaced the WebDAV stuff in 03. I am sure you have all read about this or maybe even used it but I have to say it's very easy to set up on the client side and much more stable than the nightmare that is outlook 2003 or 2007. I also like iCal as a separate app...

Getting exchange 07 configured correctly is another story altogether, but after a bunch of deployments I am beginning to to like it a lot more than exch 2003 since you can do so much with PowerShell for administration and to manage large numbers of mailboxes and users.

"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

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).

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.

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!

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).

Off the topic:

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

Incredibly so, yes. I'm going to write an indignant blog post about why it sucks right now.

Or you could write a GreaseMonkey script to remove it, then write a blog post to promote the script. This way everyone wins.

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.

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

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?

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

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. :)

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

The iPhone doesn't download attachments automatically and the attachment link clearly shows the file size. If it is too big or you don't have unlimited data, don't click it.

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