outlook express what do you want to read today??? (Outlook Express 5.5)

Member Name: fireball2002xl

Product:	Outlook Express 5.5
Date:	05/07/03 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: its free

Disadvantages: its Microsoft!!!!!!

I'll say right from the start that I've never been a big fan of the MSIE range of software. It does not, however, necessarily follow that Outlook Express will get a trashing here. On the contrary, I think that it's an excellent piece of software - for experienced Microsoft product users.

E-mail and newsgroups have come a long way since the first generation of browsers, mainly because software executives began to realise that over 70% of Internet subscribers used e-mail and newsgroups almost exclusively over the Web. The result was that companies like Netscape and Microsoft tried have tried to improve their e-mail and Usenet integration to ensure that this rather large portion of the market would not wander off and use another application.

Outlook is the natural progression of this move towards e-mail and Usenet. It is a vast improvement on the communications system in previous IE versions, but it still has a long way to go. Before I'm fobbed off as a 'the glass is half-empty' mindset let's have a look at what improvements have been made, what features Outlook Express offers and where they fall short of user expectations.

Outlook offers full HTML support, meaning that you can send and receive WebPages within e-mail. More experienced users will note that this feature is nothing new to browsers. Attachmate's Emissary has been doing this for quite some time and with a good measure of success. Outlook also supports drag and drop, for inclusion of sound files into e-mail and also customisable background images. The difference here though is that this kind of multimedia support is geared towards other Outlook Express users. Microsoft has made a very attractive looking, easy to use package, but most of this would be lost when using Outlook to send e-mail to a Netscape or other e-mail package.

Microsoft also touts "Offline reading and composing" as one of the features of Outlook. As most users
>would know, being online is not at all necessary in any e-mail package or Web browser, in order to compose a message. It makes it a touch easier though, when you don't keep getting error messages telling you that you're not online. There are some packages which do this, and it's tantamount to telling someone at the postage stamp dispensing machine that they can't buy a stamp because they haven't got a letter to put it on.


A feature which has been absent from IE mail and news applications is the ability to actually search through messages to find something specific. This is long overdue and actually works better than most other applications I have seen.

When you need to find a message, either from a newsgroup or from your inbox, you can search by sender, recipient, message text, date and even by attachment. It is a move towards this sort of functionality which will make Internet Explorer more of a user friendly entity. The realisation has obviously begun to sink in that users not only want integration, they want useful and versatile tools to manage their communication.

The integration which was sorely lacking in earlier versions of IE and Netscape is slowly becoming more and more of an issue. Outlook comprises e-mail and Usenet in much the same way Netscape Communicator does, but with the traditional Microsoft neatness. As a functional communication tool, Outlook Express is definitely a valid contender for the title of most efficient, but there are still some points that need to be addressed.

Choice is always the biggest unknown factor in the success of any product. If people feel that they aren't being allowed to exercise their own choices, then they won't be too thrilled with the product overall, regardless of efficiency or functionality.

Outlook Express is certainly not without the ability to be customised to a particular user's likes and dislikes, but overall you are st
ill l
ocked into the Microsoft method of communication. This is not all bad, as it is very versatile, full-featured and to a certain degree flexible. The main problem is that Outlook Express is not open ended. It does not allow users to determine which applications they would like to use in specific instances ie which PGP front-end they would like to use.

Of course all these problems are issues which will undoubtedly be resolved in future versions, so for now they're nothing more than holes in an otherwise impressive package.

As an addition to the Windows and IE suite, it is definitely a seamlessly integrated package which will simplify user communication and organisation no end....

Summary: