I’m a longtime user of Microsoft Outlook, since I’m well accustomed to it after years of use with various employers. It is relatively easy to use, not too badly organized, and has a few nice features. I had settled on Outlook 2000, since it is a license I own from way back. Having to spend around $80 to $100 to get a newer version was never very enticing – the 2000 version did what I needed it to do.

The trouble was that I found it to be increasingly crashy. After much trouble for both myself and my wife, it occurred to me that I hadn’t patched it (or any of the other Office components we use) since installing them. Not cool – as a software developer, I know better than that.

So, I patched Outlook and Office up to current levels. It’s great that we now have software where all the known problems and vulnerabilities have been fixed. But I was still experiencing crashes. Many more than previously, even though my wife was having better luck than ever.

It was clear that I had to change something. My choices included using a different client software, or use a web-based solution.

I had previously tried the ubiquitous Squirrel Mail as well as Horde without being very excited about them. These both have been available on every web hosting plan I’ve had for years. Neither one was particularly responsive, and I found them a bit clumsy to use. Plus, I had to login separately for each email account I have, and I have a few.

I don’t use the free email addresses that come from my ISP, but when I did, I never liked those web-based email interfaces much either. They were always slow and clunky, and once again, I had to login to those separately for each account.

I had also tried Thunderbird, but don’t recall being convinced that I should abandon Outlook for it. Plus, my wife didn’t need to be dragged through another email client experience where the default client changed. We had used Eudora long ago, and the transition to Outlook wasn’t always easy. So I didn’t wish to make my wife the victim of my experiment anymore.

Another difficulty is that I like to be able to check my email from work, but for some reason they have blocked the ports that Horde and Squirrel Mail operate on. For reasons less nebulous, they have blocked the SMTP and POP3 ports as well. So standard clients would not help me at work.

I had been using a web-based service known as Goowy to act as my email client at work. But it is a Flash based system, and was slow and clunky to use. It was effective, but hardly compelling enough to make me abandon Outlook at home.

Finally I heard about the Gmail site. Now I’ve had a Gmail account for quite some time – I grabbed one back when they were invitation only, and now use it as my login to my iGoogle page where I keep my RSS feeds. But I had never used it for email.

Then I heard (wish I could remember where) that Gmail allows you to configure it to read your POP3 email accounts into the Gmail interface. So I took a look, and was impressed with how responsive it is. It’s relative intuitive, and with 8GB of space, I can keep as much email archived there as I like. I can customize the display of email from my various accounts so they show up with different colored tags. Finally, their spam filter is top-notch. I haven’t seen a single spam message in my inbox since I began using it. It did catch one email from a legitimate sender as spam, but it was simple to mark it as “not spam” and move on.

I do wish the archived email storage allowed you to create folders to store emails by categories, or at least allowed you to tag emails with keywords for easy retrieval. But in spite of this shortfall, the search function works fine, and I don’t think I’ll lose track of any emails.

The bottom line is that I don’t miss Outlook. I don’t miss the crashes. I don’t miss worrying about backing up my Outlook .PST files, or about corrupting them. And I don’t miss being tied to a single machine for my email access. I can access my email – all of my email – from any internet connected computer I want.

I don’t think I’ll be going back.