5 ms·

One good reason that it tickled Gates' bullshit detector is that up until Outlook 2002, the Outlook .PST file format was limited to 2GB; Microsoft had a recover

One good reason that it tickled Gates' bullshit detector is that up until Outlook 2002, the Outlook .PST file format was limited to 2GB; Microsoft had a recovery tool (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088) to fix the problem. I knew someone who banged up against that limit as early as 2000, but only after saving every email they received (including many with huge attachments) for more than four years.

mdda 15y ago
But that's one thing that was distinctive about GMail : it encourages you to keep (archive) everything - and searches it very quickly. Compare this to Outlook : Searching is painfully slow, and the instinctive way to use it is to delete emails rather than keep them.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  Compare this to Outlook : Searching is painfully slow Outlook 2003 maybe, but that was eight years ago. Microsoft bought lookout and Outlook indexed search is pretty much instant.
  - Retric 15y ago
    That's BS, I use outlook 2010 and IMO Searching is still painfully slow. I suspect I probably have less than 50MB of excluding attachments so it should be nearly instant even if it's a non indexed full text search.
    - ghurlman 15y ago
      There's definitely something wrong with your setup. Windows XP will require an extra download, for example.
- weaksauce 15y ago
  I just started to use gmail's imap support to access my email accounts with thunderbird. It's quite impressive what the thunderbird team have done with it since I got disheartened with it a few years ago. One thing I was pleasantly surprised with was how good the search feature was.
prawn 15y ago
I run up against this each year. Had an initial corruption and then started new PSTs each year and separated out some of my larger clients. It's quite heart-attack inducing to corrupt a massive PST when you base a lot of work and billing on the unread status of emails!

mdda 15y ago

But that's one thing that was distinctive about GMail : it encourages you to keep (archive) everything - and searches it very quickly. Compare this to Outlook : Searching is painfully slow, and the instinctive way to use it is to delete emails rather than keep them.

jodrellblank 15y ago
Compare this to Outlook : Searching is painfully slow Outlook 2003 maybe, but that was eight years ago. Microsoft bought lookout and Outlook indexed search is pretty much instant.
- Retric 15y ago
  That's BS, I use outlook 2010 and IMO Searching is still painfully slow. I suspect I probably have less than 50MB of excluding attachments so it should be nearly instant even if it's a non indexed full text search.
  - ghurlman 15y ago
    There's definitely something wrong with your setup. Windows XP will require an extra download, for example.
weaksauce 15y ago
I just started to use gmail's imap support to access my email accounts with thunderbird. It's quite impressive what the thunderbird team have done with it since I got disheartened with it a few years ago. One thing I was pleasantly surprised with was how good the search feature was.

prawn 15y ago

I run up against this each year. Had an initial corruption and then started new PSTs each year and separated out some of my larger clients. It's quite heart-attack inducing to corrupt a massive PST when you base a lot of work and billing on the unread status of emails!