Drew's Blog

Alright.  So, I always bitch about Outlook to everyone… I dont’ hate it because I don’t like Microsoft… I don’t hate it because it doesn’t work on Linux… I hate it because it is so flip’n slow and completely lacks some features, which to me, seem like core features.  Although, it does add some nice detailed error messages.

Now, let’s start with speed.  It’s slow.  Everyday when I sit down to work, I log in.  Immediately after I login, I click on my Outlook icon and then my Thunderbird icon (I use Thunderbird at work for my personal mail… and it’s great for when Outlook crashes).  EVERY time I do this, Thunderbird pops up within a second, so I can immediately check my personal mail.  Outlook?  Oh, give it another 20 seconds or so and then maybe I can start working.

When I get new e-mails, my little Thunderbird flag comes up saying I have new mail for my account, etc etc.  I open it, read it, close it… and then Outlook tells me I have new mail.  What the hell!?  It jus took Outlook 30-60 seconds longer than Thunderbird to detect I have new mail.  Awesome.  What’s MORE awesome is that my work mail comes from an Exchange Server.  That’s right.  Microsoft’s Outlook is slower than Mozilla’s Thunderbird at detecting new mail on a Microsoft Exchange Server.  Talk about awesome.

Alright, so moving on.  The slowness of Outlook didn’t make me want to rant about it; however, the lack of this one feature managed to piss me off.  In Outlook… I can’t setup multiple SMTP accounts.  Now, before you say "YES YOU CAN HAVE MORE THAN ONE MAIL ACCOUNT MR.UNINFORMED BAD MAN!"  What I’m talking about is ONLY-SMTP accounts.  In Outlook, you can only create accounts that have incoming/outgoing mail.  Well, in my case, what I needed to do was setup my exchange account, and then setup a different account to send all mail from.  The second account doesn’t have any incoming mail as due to the way the server is setup.

You may be asking yourself… what kind of crazy setup is this!?  Well, it wasn’t for my computer, and it’s just my job.  Looking at our Microsoft Server setup makes me want to cry at the stupidity sometimes.

I managed to do this in a round-about way by setting up the second account as a POP3 account, giving it a fake incoming address, and then disabling all incoming transactions.  That’s way more work than that should’ve been.  For instance, let’s go over Thunderbird!

In Thunderbird, there’s a SECTION for it.  Yes Microsoft people… in Thunderbird, you can actually setup SMTP accounts only.  Amazing, isn’t it?  I actually use this feature on my Thunderbird, as I have all of my campus e-mail forwarded to gmail; however, I still want to use my campus SMTP server to send my mail (so it doesn’t go through GMail "on behalf of so-and-so")

Now, to me, this is a core feature.  If I want to setup an account that ONLY sends mail or ONLY receives mail, I should be able to.  In Thunderbird, I can have an account send mail by default from a different account and on top of that, I can have default sending accounts for each of my mail accounts.  Can’t do that in Outlook without creating another account and then setting that to default for the whole system… so in that situation, you couldn’t set a default one for each.  So, each time you sent an e-mail from a different account, you’d have to set which account to send from.  Pain-In-The-Ass.

All in all, Thunderbird is far superior to Outlook.  Sad to say, it seems that everything Mozilla makes is better than the Microsoft counterpart.  (Example: Firefox vs Internet Explorer).  If you honestly think IE is better than Firefox, you can burn in hell.  =)