Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer. So I think I'll give Azure/whatever a miss.

Correction: Outlook is to most people on Hacker News the most irritating ... To most people who don't read this site, its a tool that reliably does everything they need it to do.

Yeah, until they need to find an email from 2 months ago. Then they wish they had Gmail at work.

Which usually means the shark fins are starting to circle, regardless of whether the folks in the boat have noticed the mindshare leak.

Apart from searching. Or anything else useful.

I use it daily and love it. I switched from Gmail to Thunderbird to Outlook 2007 with Exchange and have never been happier.

It has reasonable search, which I don't need much anyway since it has hierarchical folders and great filtering. It has a preview pane, the lack of which makes Gmail unusable to me. Unlike Gmail the layout is intuitive and it doesn't take me forever to remember where the spam folder is. Between Barracuda and Outlook's spam filtering I get very little in my Inbox. And if I look in my Junk folder guess where 99% of the emails came from? They were sent to my Gmail account which auto-forwards to Exchange. Gmail's spam filtering might be good in comparison to Hotmail but Barracuda (and probably many other third party boxes) blows it out of the water.

It works with Exchange 2007 so that my emails, contacts, tasks, and calendar events are constantly and instantly synced across the 3 PCs I use frequently and my phone. I can enter an address in a calendar event on Outlook, then seconds later on my phone tap it and have the location pop up in Google Maps. I can save a phone number from an email on my desktop and call it almost immediately after from my mobile. Any smart phone user can do these things.

I'd probably have a much different outlook on Outlook if I had to run the Exchange server, but I just pay some company $6/mo per mailbox to do that for me. There are dozens of such companies for small businesses. (We use Sherweb, and they rock.)

Oh and Outlook doesn't make me disable Firebug :)

If you know people who email a lot, they'll pretty much all tell you that you really can't beat the Microsoft email stack. I'm small potatoes compared to the volume some of my friends do in a day, and they've all tried every email option available since its what they spend most of their time doing.

Are you guys kidding? Compared to what alternative is Outlook an "irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish?"

That alternative definitely isn't open source (like Evolution, which blows hard). It's definitely not a Web app somewhere (ala Google). Outlook isn't rubbish, by far, and y'all don't know what you're talking about. :)

Yes, I originally had a parenthetical comment comment about it being locked-in because of PHBs, but deleted it because the comment was snide and detracted from the point.

>Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer.

You're forgetting that it was competing with Lotus Notes.