July 22, 2005

Email: So Powerful Yet So Lacking

I was brought up using Eudora and fondly sent and received thousands and thousands of emails over the years. I then moved on to Mozilla Thunderbird as Eudora crashed too much and I wanted to know what the excitement was about Thunderbird. I love it.

However, now that I've migrated to a PocketPC (Dell Axim 50 - VERY good tool) from the miserable Palm platform. I'm now using Outlook as PocketPC uses Outlook to store calendar, notes and contacts in.

I think Outlook, overall has many more features than Eudora or Thunderbird have, that I didn't realize.

However, Washington Popst writer Rob Pegoraro writes You might think not, looking at the sleepy state of the market for consumer mail software in Windows. One of the two most widely used programs in this category, Microsoft's Outlook Express, has not had a meaningful update since 1999, save security fixes for its appalling history of vulnerabilities. The other is Microsoft's bloated, corporate-centric Outlook, normally sold only with its Office suite for $150 and up. These are not exactly programs that inspire love.

That kind of situation ought to be ripe for exploitation by competitors offering better programs. Yet for several years running, the only serious challenge to Microsoft's not-so-dynamic duo has come from Web-mail sites such as Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail (which, since they don't work as quickly as a stand-alone program and can't be used offline, don't amount to a viable alternative for many users). Read the full Washington Post article

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