Mon 12 Nov 2007
Of Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, and Startups
Posted by jtmcarthur under Startups, Technology
[2] Comments
I received the following message this weekend:
I received a failed delivery message because your mailbox was full. Here’s the email again.
Mike
The failed delivery message to my potential client was courtesy of my internet service provider that provides my corporate email. Luckily this potential client also knew my personal gmail address and forwarded his company overview to that address for my review. Shame on me. I had not cleared Outlook or my corporate email service from the last 3 months of emails. Yes, that’s right, 3 months.
I used Lotus Notes at both of my previous companies, and thanks to benevolent CIOs, I got away with greater-than-company-policy email folders. I never mastered the art of archiving emails. Or rather, I never mastered the technique of recovering archived emails. The search of old emails within Lotus Notes was slow, to put it mildly, but given enough time, I had a reasonably good chance of finding an old email for which I was looking. Not so anymore, now that my ISP is delivering my email. I have to delete stuff, archive stuff. Who knows? I guess I could print the stuff out and file it. But, I know that’s not how I want to spend my time.
I’d move to gmail for my company in a heartbeat, but for the lack of availability of a company-specific domain name through gmail. Heck, I’d even let them post ads. They do such a good job of filtering out spam, I figure I’m better than even on that proposition.
Google just upgraded me, and the rest of the free-app world, I suspect, to 4852 MB. Without worrying whether that’s a 1024-kilobyte megabyte or a 1000-kilobyte megabyte, it’s a lot more capacity than I am getting from my email hosting service. On gmail, I’m now using 13% of my available capacity, having used the service for just over 2-1/2 years. So, even if they don’t increase my storage capacity again, I should be good for the next 20 years.
I have one question for my hosting provider and for the folks at Microsoft Outlook:
Why can I retrieve a random, two-year-old email over the internet in less than a second from gmail, when my hosting provider offers no web-interface search capabilities and Microsoft Outlook take several minutes to search for a similarly random 3-month-old email from my local hard drive?
My suggestion to startups. Stick with gmail as long as you can.
I can’t speak on behalf of the Microsoft product groups that develop our email applications, but I can speak on behalf of my own experiences. I’m running Windows Vista and Outlook 2007. Whether I’m searching my desktop or my email, any keyword search returns instantaneous results. As soon as I strike the key on my keyboard, the results are displayed. I’d be happy to show you in person. I also have a great cellphone experience using Windows Mobile 6.
Outlook 2007 is my corporate email app. In terms of personal email, I’m using Windows Live Mail. I’ve been extremely happy with that – much better than previous online email apps I’ve used. This to me comes the closest to replicating the desktop experience in a cloud computing mode.
Tony, you have discovered that I am not current in terms of my software releases. I’m on Outlook 2003 and WindowsXP. When I discussed my email search issues with a friend at a local reseller, he suggested, “Do what I do. Search Outlook with Google Desktop.” Turns out Google Desktop searches both the active and archived folders and it’s a quick way to find emails, if you are not on the latest releases of Microsoft products.