E-Mail Providers and Software
Posted by vampire at 06:20 PM on January 19, 2007.
I have email accounts from Jaring, Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail, and company mail. My main accounts are my company mail and Hotmail. The rest are for minor purposes such as signing up for new services, for receiving spam, etc...All these years, I've been using the free Outlook Express by Microsoft to check/send my e-mails. It works fine with all my accounts, except for Yahoo, which discontinued its POP server years ago.
But a few days ago, I had to type a long mail to a vendor detailing my problems, and had to show him some source codes. It was difficult to format my text in html format using Outlook Express' editor, but I managed to do it in the end.
That prompted me to try out Microsoft Outlook. This piece of software is not free. You gotta have license for it. Outlook is powerful in the sense that it has a calendar, can organize your notes, schedule meetings, has a mail voting system (if I'm not mistaken) and so on. But I do not use all those in this small company I work for. I just want to check all of my mails with minimal fuss, but with as much features as possible.
Alas, there are many features in Outlook Express that is either non-existent in Microsoft Outlook, or very difficult to locate/change settings, such as:
- selecting specific accounts to check mail, instead of checking all
- MS Outlook synchronizes the hotmail account inbox, and downloads all messages. Outlook Express allows you to select only the ones you want to read.
- the panels in MS Outlook are flexible, and every time I change folder, it takes time to load the layout... slow...
- the Junk E-mail feature in MS Outlook is difficult to use/configure, not done automatically.
- the pictures in a mail is not inline with the text. Gotta click and open the attached pictures individually.
So, I tried Mozilla Thunderbird. Interface is nice and simple, but looks much better than Outlook Express. But one flaw stopped me from further using it. I can't check my http-based Hotmail account using it. I heard that Hotmail (Microsoft-owned) doesn't want to support Thunderbird, their rival. *sigh*
In the end, it's either I go back to Outlook Express, or stop using Hotmail. I can't stop using hotmail so easily. I've been attached to it for 10 yrs... Their spam filter is good, but maybe not as good as GMail's. So, I'm now back to Outlook Express.