A buddy of mine had an interesting take on Outlook, Microsoft’s main email client. I thought it was worth sharing — especially given Tim’s complaint that no one visits his /. journal.

“I’ve gotten word that GSW is switching to Outlook as their supported email client. Co-workers have raved about how good it is, so I decided to take the plunge and switch. It’s a great program… like Palm Desktop mated with Eudora, without the slow-downs that I got every time I checked my mail with eudora. Anyway, I have only a few gripes about it: 1) It’s the mainstream option — everyone uses it, so it’s going to be the one that exploiters will attack. 2) Mail filters (”rules”) are hard to set up. 3) The default format for outgoing mail is *horrible* I can’t do anything about the first two problems, but I couldn’t stand top-posting with rich-text and HTML mail, so I did some research and came up with this link: http://mailformat.dan.info/config/outlook.html Now, my mail is formatted properly when I send it out – bottom-posting and plain text, line wrap nice and smooth. Good stuff. It actually looks like a professional geek’s email.”

What I think’s significant about this post is a trend I see among the more advanced of my computing buddies. In short, the trend is to recognize decent software regardless of the source. If it’s from the Mozilla foundation, great. If it’s from Microsoft, great. No need to get all activist about it.

I have always liked Outlook. It’s a bit big, to be sure, but it’s a decent mail client. Given the fact that it’s able to be tweaked the way Tim shows here, it’s an even more attractive choice for corporate mail. The bottom line is that there are so few options for the corporate side of things. It’s pretty much Outlook or Lotus Notes. For me, Outlook is the easy choice on that one.

vacation_remaining = 0

Not good for the home team…