Outlook 2007 again…

I’ve been doing the low-bandwidth mobile thing for the past two months due to travel and had accordingly been reserving judgment JUST IN CASE that had anything at all to do with it. But it really doesn’t. Outlook 2007 is an absolute loser of a product. No other software on my computer is as visibly frustrating or unstable. It’s being used with three POP accounts (all mostly well behaved) and one IMAP store (unmitigated disaster) that work fine with other clients. This shouldn’t be so hard to get right. I don’t like having to use webmail, though at least it’s very good webmail.

These are the sort of niggly problems that make OS X look appealing… Mail.app is integrated with OS search and all that other stuff so nicely. Calendars and Contacts are no longer compellingly better on Outlook than elsewhere. In fact, between Sony Ericsson and Microsoft, various contacts in my phone managed to get junked because of character encoding issues — even when using a language installed on both phone and sync computer.

Email is a freakin’ ancient tech. Why can’t this just be straightforward, Microsoft?