Review of Outlook
This one is a pet peeve. I am not going to be objective on this, not a bit.
I've been an Outlook hater for probably 20 years now. I started using it on my first real job. Privately I probably used webmail or even Outlook Express. I don't recall what it was, I assume it worked fine for me then.
Then on the job came the "real thing", Outlook from the Office suite. It felt like serious "corporate" software at first, bit soon learned about the beast. Slow. Bloated. Unpractical.
My work computer wasn't top notch, but Outlook took longer to start than SQL Server Management Studio. Come on, you are a fucking email client, just show me my email! Even when open, selected email messages took (still take?) long to open. It's text, what are you decoding it from an obscure Goa'uld dialect, submitted over tape?!
Rendering. You've heard of HTML, that new fancy new markup for rendering content? Why not use it, it seems simple. No? Rather use sniffing conditionals ([if !mso]), proprietary tags (<o:p></o:p>) insert extra tags, classes, CSS. It's not like HTML and CSS have been around for a while, so no wonder you had no time to render according to standards. Yeah, we'll wait another 20 years.
Even after piecing together a layout that renders roughly the same across email clients, you have to make an update that somehow breaks what was just a few days ago a simple button. Now it's just an ugly link with a background color.
That is probably why you don't offer a source HTML editor. Even displaying the source of email is nigh to impossible, if I recall correctly. To be fair (ahem, trying at least), I'm looking it up now. Aha, Actions -> Other Actions -> View Source. Could be worse I suppose. Just a bit more browsing reveals that viewing the source has been removed from some places, moved to other places. Or something like that. I couldn't bear to read the whole answer.
Isn't Office, of which Outlook is part of, supposed to be a productivity suite? Like allow users to be productive by not shifting around or removing functions? Nooo, being productive means looking around for function you were used to, only to find in forums that they have been moved, made worse or removed.
A small but huge thing: That email header, the thing in the current message in the reading pane. The thing that shows the sender, recipients, subject, a big profile image. Why is it so huge? Why cannot it be collapsed? Why is it taking up a third of the reading pane? I'm not reading my emails on a vertically rotated 24 inch screen.
The size of this header seems to have been reduced in New Outlook. So they had to make a wholly new generation or Outlook to make the header smaller? Was the old Outlook designed with a hardcoded layout and non-collapsible panes?
That is enough ranting for now. I'm somewhat surprised that not more expletives found their way into my review, if you can call it that. I hope that you are satisfied with your email client. If not, I hope you are not technologically locked into using a client that you dislike. It's good that most email services use IMAP, even corporate ones, so you can likely use any modern email client other than Outlook.
Update 29 Sep 2025:
Stumbled upon a similar opinion piece on The Register that includes Outlook: Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity