I’m in the process of putting everything for my business on to a Windows 8.1 laptop, and I detest Outlook on 8.1, it’s awful.

I have four email accounts and the way it handles them is just mind bending in comparison the mac they are on at present.

Any ideas anyone??

gmail or thunderbird?

gmail is v powerful and the new inbox is pretty good.

Gmail or inbox (I use Gmail for all my accounts).

Gmail every time.

when you say Gmail is that as a client or just to view gmail accounts?

I have three accounts which use IMAP/POP3, would they work on this?

to clarify, i’m not looking for a new provider, just a nicer interface than outlook to use emails from.

gmail will act as a pop3/imap client.

Have a look at Mailbird, comes in a free and paid version (I know, paying for software in this day and age.. pah!!). I’ve been using it for my personal email for about a year and it seems solid.

http://www.getmailbird.com/

I detest Outlook on 8.1

Are you talking about the full Office Outlook, or the Metro ‘Mail’ app in 8.1?

The latter is very basic and really only makes sense for use with touch on a tablet. It does make it easier for a quick check on mail though.

Full desktop Outlook is the same as it is on any other version of Windows, except running on 8.1 you also get touch support enabled (can be turned off).

Full Outlook is OTT for many, but for me it’s the king of mail apps still, especially when connected to an Exchange or Office 365 server. Really liking the fancy stuff (in the business world) where someone sends you a mail proposing a meeting at a particular time or suggests some action to be done, and it automatically has parsed the mail and suggests adding tasks or calendar items for these.

However I will admit Outlook is not the easiest of software to configure mail accounts with.

Gmail I hate. Awful design, hate the way it does folders, generally impossible to use keyboard to make mass selections and deletions. Largely online only also. Also I believe you can’t on the free version use it to access (without importing as a copy) external IMAP mailboxes, only POP3. You can however use a client app to access Gmail using IMAP.

Thunderbird is nearest I got to Outlook but even today it can’t do calendar built in and the optional add-ins were poor when I tried them compared to Outlook.

Full Outlook is OTT for many, but for me it’s the king of mail apps still, especially when connected to an Exchange or Office 365 server.

Full-fat Outlook has always been one of the best corporate email clients and one of the worst Internet email clients. It’s just not what it was designed to do.

I’ve pretty much given up on standalone clients for non-corporate email these days, I just use webmail. The last one I used was Live Mail or whatever Outlook Express is called this week.

Full-fat Outlook has always been one of the best corporate email clients and one of the worst Internet email clients. It’s just not what it was designed to do.

Agree with the first point, disagree with the second – currently using Outlook as a the client for my gmail, it just works as I’d expect.

Another vote for Full Fat Outlook, much better than Thunderbird imo due to all the calender etc integration. Overall I’m just a huge fan of Office 365, just integrates so well – finally Microsoft have pulled their finger out. Outlook for Android is also pretty good ime and is now my Android go to email client.

Full-fat Outlook has always been one of the best corporate email clients and one of the worst Internet email clients.

+1

The OLW interface is just horrible….

Thunderbird suits me and add the Lightning calendar if you need that
It’ll get your GMail for you as well

everything for my business on to a Windows 8.1 laptop

never mind email, have you already got the backup sorted ?

Outlook FTW. Unfortunately I’m stuck with Lotus Notes at work, quite possibly one of the most awful pieces of software ever. It was crap when I first had to use it back in 1999, and it’s not improved since then.

Oh, god. I still have nightmares of using Notes in various companies.

One of the only 3 in the world to be able to preview INSIDE mail window : word, xlsx, pdf, jpg, pwt…
GREAT feature

Outlook has done that for years.

Why only a specific version (and an out of date one at that)? Very limiting if there is a flaw found in it!

Hormel’s finest I think. (And the product he was touting is known for sending data to China.) Deleted.

I still have nightmares of using Notes in various companies.

Why?

Avoid Outlook for iOS. I really liked it, but it made my phone go funny – stopped responding to touch, lock/unlock fixed it for a minute or so.. restart the same.. really frustrating.

Seems back to normal now I’ve killed it, though I did do a blat/restore inbetween. Interested to know if anyone has seen this too (iPhone 6, around 70Gb free)

People are still being forced to use Notes. Shit me that’s bad.

Outlook for me but if I had to use something else it would be Thunderbird.