I've always used Outlook Express (now "Windows Mail" in Vista) for personal e-mail. (Well, that's not totally true - in university I used Elm on a terminal, and when I got access to a DECstation, upgraded to using the e-mail client in Netscape Navigator...version 3, I think...) OE is simple, straightforward and gets the job done with low hassle-factor (usually). Business-related e-mail is a different story. "Full-Blown" Outlook was my choice because I was familiar with it from my pre-self-employment days, and I needed its archiving capabilities, enhanced contact-management, notes, tasks and calendaring features. And it was included in Office 2003, which I happened to have at the time.
Everything was going along swimmingly until I was invited to a meeting via e-mail and the invitation was sent with anything but Outlook, it seemed. When trying to open the invitation, Outlook would error-out with the usual less-than-helpful message, something about Gregorian calendars. I managed to hack my way around the problem by manually deleting the 'daylight' section(s) from the .ics file, but lately, even that work-around wouldn't work, and I'd finally had enough. Not only did I have to expend extra effort to import an event into my calendar, but Outlook 2003 was also lacking other abilities, the most annoying of which were that multiple calendars were not integrated into one set of events, and event alerts would only work on the default calendar.
My first instinct was to look into upgrading to Outlook 2007 - I'd heard good things about it (from a Mac person, even!) and assumed that it would have all the modern calendaring features I was looking for. Then I realized that I'd thought the same thing about pretty much every previous version of Outlook/Office I'd tried (2.0, 97, 2000, 2003): "Well, I'll just upgrade - that should have everything I need...." But then it doesn't, or a feature I loved is gone, or some other piece that I took for granted is now broken, and I find I'd invested a whole whack-pile of money (because that's how much the Office suite costs: CDN$wholeWhackPile.99) in a product that doesn't quite fill my needs, but I couldn't switch since I'd just spent all this money....!
So, I spent my weekend migrating to Mozilla Thunderbird. The chatter around the 'Net was positive.....and it was cheap. I've also found that a lot of the features I'd thought I needed, I really don't. I don't get enough e-mail to need to archive it, a basic address book is sufficient, and there's only ever been one note in my notes folder, so Thunderbird's feature-set should be enough.
TB has a wizard for moving mail, addresses and account settings from Outlook, so that made things easy, although I did hit a couple bumps in the road with some non-standard ports on a mail server, a deleted e-mail being flagged as a virus and crashing the import process, and a little more control over which folders actually get imported would have been nice, too. Also got myself a Canadian Dictionary for the spell checker, a text Clippings manager for signatures (and any other frequently-used text), Lightning for calendaring, and added a calendar of Canadian holidays & events. Real easy installs with TB's add-ons manager.
The coolest part is that, while browsing all the add-ons available for TB, I ran across Provider for Google Calendar. This allows me to create and publicly share a Google calendar, but only show my free/busy information. Now anyone who wants to book a meeting with me can point their own calendaring software at my public calendar and see when I'm available, saving tonnes of time sending e-mails back and forth just trying to coordinate a time when all parties can make it.
I'm excited about my new setup and hope it works as well as I think it will, but the proof will be in the real-world use....fingers crossed....
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