What Do Software Programs Provide For Email Communication?

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Nowadays, there are multiple online email services with enormous user bases (like Gmail) but also standalone desktop applications that provide a varying degree of functionality or sophistication but importantly, allow the user to store emails locally and can significantly enhance the productivity for those that need to search or access their email or embedded attachments very often.

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 The Multitude Of Email Managing Apps And The Implications

        Given that new applications keep appearing while older ones stop being supported, users are constantly faced with the need to migrate from one application to another. Thus, some might need to export Thunderbird to Outlook or Incredimail to The Bat, or even from older to newer version within the same family of apps, like in the case of Outlook.

Top Desktop Email Clients

Among the most popular standalone applications for managing emails, attachments, calendars, and contacts the following can be mentioned:

  • MS Outlook – this is the most popular tool developed and actively supported by Microsoft. It boasts extensive functionality with rich search and email sorting features, rich contact information. Given that it comes preinstalled and free with every new Windows installation, it is a very natural choice for individual users but also for enterprises;
  • Thunderbird – one of the important competitors to Microsoft products in the past. This free program has been developed by Mozilla (the same company behind the famous Firefox browser), however, it could never keep the same evolutionary dynamics as Firefox and the mainstream support was ultimately discontinued because continued development was not justified financially. Nevertheless, the program packs a lot of features, the possibility to add third-party plugins, it supports several accounts, has no adds, etc., but has a somewhat cluttered interface;
  • eM client. It has been around for almost 10 years and was made to support a very comprehensive list of mail providers. It supports encryption, advanced search, automatic translation, integrated chat. Besides, exporting and importing data is very well implemented. TechRadar even named it the best email software for Windows 10 and other Windows versions, which is quite an honorable title. Importantly, however, to be able to use several accounts (more than two), the Pro version is needed;
  • Mailbird lite. Unlike the pro version, the free version of this email client supports a single account and does not offer attachment previews, email snoozing, speed reading. Nevertheless, it comes with some important benefits, such as speed, ease of setup, integrating with social apps and Google calendar, it allows team working, scheduling, chatting, etc.

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Even with the abundant choice of free email managers, it is hard to pick read more

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Interface

        The interface of the Microsoft product is rather bloated with a multitude of buttons/shortcuts to a set of features that most users would likely access rather rarely (power users might appreciate this aspect though). By contrast, the inbox appears rather clutter-free. As for Thunderbird, the most visually disturbing default issue is the small font size of the message box (while the text window can be enlarged, the font size stays the same and it is not particularly obvious how to change it).

Searching

        Appearance and interface alone rarely determine the choice of email client. Users might think to export Thunderbird to Outlook rather in the case when there is a big difference in the provided functionality. Searching is one of the crucial aspects in this respect due to the fact that it can greatly affect the productivity, especially when huge email databases need to be processed daily to extract useful information.

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MS Outlook is one of the series of Outlook products that Microsoft kept offering for free as part of its Windows releases. The initial version had enough bugs and issues, which determined many users to become loyal to other desktop email clients, such as Thunderbird, The Bat, etc. All these provided an interesting diversity and unique solutions to the same problems. The situation seems to have changed nowadays when Outlook has become a much more refined product with an incredibly large user base (approximately 400 million people).

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The Past Of MS Outlook And The Competition

At the same, many other email clients simply could not keep the pace with the market or simply found the efforts financially unjustified. A typical example is Thunderbird, the open source application developed by Mozilla that had a fairly large popularity in the last decade. This situation required many loyal users to export Thunderbird to Outlook read more

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The growth of MS Outlook users is perhaps not fulminant but still steady and very significant. Thus, in 2011, the user base consisted of approximately 360 million people, while in 2018, Microsoft reported 400 million users for the Windows Live Hotmail service. It is really hard to estimate the number of corporate users among these, but a very rough estimate based on some global statistics suggest that the figure could exceed 25%.

MS Outlook

        Interestingly, in the past, there were enough bugs and issues with Outlook which determined a strong competition from other email clients, such as The Bat or Thunderbird. Since mainstream support for Thunderbird was abandoned by Mozilla, users were faced with an insecure future of the application and had to find ways to export Thunderbird to Outlook, namely to transfer the email data, attachments, contacts, etc. to the Microsoft application.

Advantages Of Using Outlook

Below are 10 key advantages of Outlook as compared to other platforms:

  • the fact that the entire email database (message bodies, attachments, contacts) is stored offline (on the computer) allows incomparably faster email search, greatly enhancing employee productivity;
  • the ability to organize the mail into folders is considered by many users more intuitive compared to grouping by labeling (as adopted by other email clients);
  • deep integration of emails with the calendar and contacts;
  • organizing email is possible by color coding and by assigning them to one or more categories (calendar event, scheduled task, message, etc.);
  • extensive email search possibilities using keywords but also various ways of filtering search results by the location of saving, by email size, the sender, the time range when it could have been received/sent, etc.;
  • much better control of the calendar compared to the competition (e.g. control details when sharing calendar events or busy/free schedules with specific individuals);

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  • the possibility to move emails to folders or assign categories based on a more extensive set of rules (which is better than the limited filtering capabilities of some clients);
  • Outlook contact cards contain extensive contact information (address, job title, department, photo, etc.) and even allows to check real-time availability of the client;
  • Outlook issues early warnings/tips whenever composing an email destined for a group rather than an individual (helps prevent accidents), but also when the recipient is away on vacation or has enabled automatic responses (saves time);
  • the ability to ignore conversations is more simple and intuitive.

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