10 ms·
I've been using Outlook by choice, well, forever. I won't bother listing all the reasons for this. It's powerful and it works well. And, if you are a program
by robomartin 14y ago
I've been using Outlook by choice, well, forever. I won't bother listing all the reasons for this. It's powerful and it works well. And, if you are a programmer, you can go to town writing your own customizations with VBA.
I use Yahoo Mail online for most of my personal stuff. Out of all the online email offerings out there I have found it to be the most "polished" (if I can use that term) and outlook-like. I tried Gmail a couple of years back and just didn't do it for me. As an example, the lack of a real time preview pane was a huge deal breaker for me. Both Outlook and Yahoo Mail have this. Maybe Gmail has this now, I don't know.
The other thing about Gmail that scared the crap out of me was to watch as one of our clients had their Gmail account evaporate because their AdSense account got shut down. They were new to the platform and made a couple of dumb and innocent mistakes off the line. Google bots summarily shut-down the account with no recourse or anyone to contact. As their account got suspended so went Gmail. I'll let you venture a guess as to whether or not these people are using any Google products now.
Here's a feature I wish email clients would implement: Tabbed accounts.
I run more than one company and regularly monitor a dozen email accounts. Outlook and Yahoo Mail allow you to setup rules to deliver email from specific accounts into designated folders. With Outlook you can also choose to store the email in separate files. That's all well and fine, but the whole thing has the risk of becoming cluttered and difficult to use after a while.
There's an Outlook hack that allows you to launch multiple Outlook instances. This works very well as I can launch one instance that opens the email addresses corresponding to one business and another instance with a separate business. Having multiple monitors makes this even handier.
What would be even better is if I could do the same thing with tabs. I want one tab per business --or a user-designated category. Each tab would receive and send email from one or many email addresses. They would all be independent while having relevant sharing capabilities (copy and past, drag and drop, etc.).
It's about context switching.
With something like that I could have a single email client handle all of my business email as well as personal within one application window. That would be slick.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dlikhten 14y agoI find Sparrow does that so incredibly well. I use 2 accounts daily, and have 2 more for "spam" accounts. It works really well at separating and unifying them.
- CognitiveLens 14y agoAlas, poor Sparrow! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite utility, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. --- Here's hoping that other email clients learn well from Sparrow's success.
- shortlived 14y agoI've asked the question before: is modern spam filtering not enough? I used to have several accounts to void spam, but that was pre-bayesian. Filtering works great now and I use the same email for everything and anything..
- 2arrs2ells 14y agoGmail allows you to sign in to multiple accounts at the same time (in different tabs). I have two pinned tabs always open in Chrome - one for personal, one for business emails. Works incredibly well for me.
- danielweber 14y agoHow does this work? If I sign out in one tab, it signs me out in another tab, on Google Chrome. Just tested it.
- wan23 14y agohttp://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1721977 http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
- phenylene 14y agoHere's how I do it using Google Chrome: 1. Sign in to personal Gmail by going to gmail.google.com 2. Sign in to work Gmail by going to mail.google.com/a/foo.com (obviously, replace foo.com with your work domain)
- c0nfused 14y agoJust click on your account name in gmail, hit add account at the bottom of the little menu, and bam more accounts in more tabs.
- archangel_one 14y agoI click on my account picture in the top right, then click on "Add account" and log into the other one. Presto, two accounts. Disclaimer: I am about 99% certain this is not some weird internal Google feature (not on the gmail team, don't worry), but it's also been > 1 week since I had to go through this performance so I may have forgotten some detail.
- tlogan 14y agoAnd then when you click on some Google service it always logs you in with a wrong account. Good luck trying to add something to calendar by clicking to a link.
- ok_craig 14y agoI'm pretty sure with Google you can link up to 10 accounts, and you can have as many Gmail windows open as you want for various accounts that are linked. So if you want five different Gmail tabs open at the same time, just link the accounts behind them and it's possible. I personally have two independent Gmail accounts open at all times.
- robomartin 14y agoGmail might warrant a second look. I have not touched it in more than two years. Yahoo Mail is good enough for me to pay for their enhanced service, Google would have to offer something better.
- mtgx 14y agoThe free Gmail is better than Yahoo's paid service, though.
- gddr 14y agoAs a long-time Yahoo mail user, I'd say basically any email service is better than Yahoo Mail, at least if we're talking about their webmail interfaces. (Protip: http://us.mc598.mail.yahoo.com/mc/launch http://us.mc598.mail.yahoo.com/mc/launch)
- flibble 14y agoYou certainly can. It works well except for 1) from time time you get an odd gmail error and the only way to get it working is to log out of all your accounts, and 2) it would be nice if there was an easier way to log into 8 gmail accounts at once. It's a pain setting up your 8 windows every time you get logged out.
- Encosia 14y agoCould you point me toward that multiple instance tweak? That's something I've wanted for a while.
- robomartin 14y agoHere are my notes on that (I'm running Vista 64 Ultimate): RUNNING MULTIPLE INSTANCES OF OUTLOOK Download and install "ExtraOutlook.exe" from: http://www.hammerofgod.com/download/ExtraOutlook.zip http://www.hammerofgod.com/download/ExtraOutlook.zip Copy the executable to the folder where outlook lives. In the current case that means: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ Create a profile for each separate instance of Outlook we want to run: To create and manage profiles in Vista 64 go to Control Panel > View 32-bit Control Panel Items > Mail > Show Profiles Create or modify the Outlook shortcut on the desktop to access the desired profile: Profile 1: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ExtraOutlook.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile "Profile 1" Make a duplicate copy and then... Profile 2: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ExtraOutlook.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile "Profile 2" Now two instances of Outlook can be opened and each is independently accessing the corresponding profile's data. I go through the extra effort of assigning a different icon to each account and placing them on the quick-launch toolbar. I've been doing this for about two years and it works great. No issues whatsoever. I can't believe MS doesn't implement MDI in Outlook so that one can do this using tabs and a single instance.
- Encosia 14y agoThanks for posting your notes. I'm running into a "Function not found in Import Table" error when I try that with Outlook 2010. Have you ever run into that?
- robomartin 14y agoNo, I've never seen that. I'm running Office 2007.
- 1010011010 14y agoYou're an email hipster. Good point about the Google account bans, though. See also: Skydrive. Bad point about mixing personal and business email in one window, though. That's a disaster waiting to happen.
- robomartin 14y agoI don't think I said that I mix personal and business email in one window. Yes, that is a disaster waiting to happen. No, the idea is to have tabs that you can organize based on the context you need. One tab would be personal. Another might emails from one business. The other might be setup for the other. I wear a couple of hats, so, for example, I'd love to have a tab that's just "Business #1 Engineering" and a separate tab that's "Business #1 Business" and keep those "personalities" separate. My engineering email address is different from my business email address as I've found that this keeps the individual mailboxes cleaner overall. Just my preference. Doesn't make it right. I also have hundreds or rules and lots of VBA code in Outlook making sense out of the whole mess. I wouldn't have been able to do what I've been doing over the last fifteen years without the level of programming and manipulation available in Outlook.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- LinaLauneBaer 14y agoI feel offended by your 4am statement... I really like getting up early and I don't know why so many people try to get up late - but I would never say they are not normal.
- kvnn 14y agoYou offend easily.
- LinaLauneBaer 14y agoSorry, but how do I offend you?
- greyboy 14y agoDifferent strokes for different folks. I realize this is Hacker News, but Outlook isn't the worst [email or otherwise] product someone can use. Edit: The comment was originally: "I've been using Outlook by choice" Sorry, but I just can't wrap my head around this. You say you have tried other clients and yet you keep coming back to Outlook? Did you only try a few web app clients a few years ago and not sense? Have you tried many other fat desktop and/or command line clients? I personally only interact with Outlook when my employer pays me to spend the extra time required to use Outlook. I am utterly baffled by your statement. Like when someone says they get up at 4am every day, but they are not in the military. Sure there might be some okay reasons to do that (a baby, international trading, long commute), but most normal people would still inquire for more information as getting up at 4am by choice is not normal.
- doc4t 14y agoWhat an arrogant comment. Can you tell us what it is you dislike so much about outlook and why, instead of inferring that the user base is unenlightened?
- GICodeWarrior 14y agoGmail has "Preview Pane" option under the Labs tab in Settings. I don't use it personally, but I am pretty sure it has been there for at least a few years. Any unpaid account has a chance of being shut down without recourse. I haven't heard of this happening with any Google Apps accounts though (especially paid ones). Anyone else?
- unicornporn 14y agoOMG, seems Yahoo Mail finally got https (I'm using the free version). Could be time for me to switch from Gmail.
- Bellyache5 14y agoEven though it's no longer under development, I wonder if Thunderbird's default tabbed interface would meet your needs.