outlook so big it's clogging my system

what's the alternative

[musicales]

I'm getting sick of outlook slowing my machine down. I get hundreds of emails a day and even though I'm archiving things the program is clearly not designed to cope - it grinds to a halt and grinds everything else to a halt too. I could use something online but I need to be able to send and receive from multiple email accounts. I know you can't do this yet with gmail. Anyone got any good alternatives?

[bloke in a box]

Pegasus is a very very good alternative.

[danmccarthy]

Here's what I'm thinking of doing to solve this problem: Still Use Outlook as my day-to-day email program, but set up (via my web host) a forward that sends a copy of all emails to my gmail account. I can then delete as many emails from outlook as necessary to speed things up, and at the same time also take advantage of the great search capabilities of gmail. I'm pretty sure there's even a way to import old emails into gmail.

[FridayNight]

I have been using The BAT! for past 7 years because it is extremely fast and with really nice features.

ritlabs.com if you want to check it out

[Leosghost]

Bat is faster ..Eudora is cheaper and faster than outlook ..and anything is safer than outlook anyway ..then again some here use Tbird ..

[jorj]

Why don't you use folders inside Outlook and rules to automatically move your messages there (by subject, sender, email address, etc)? It is beter to work with 10 directories (files) then with one. Eventually you can create new ones every 3 months and move the ones older than one year to a backup device.

The advice is not only for Outlook. I hate to admit but I am tired to learn how to use the tricks of another email client although I am not a fan of Outlook.

[bakedjake]

Opera M2 - It's what Google copied GMail from.

[webmstr]

Gmail is great. DO you have an invitation?
I could post one if you need it.

[danmccarthy]

M2 Sounds incredible, the only issue is that I really like Firefox for web browsing, and don't want to switch to Opera. On Opera's website, there is a way to separate the mail client from the browser, but it sounds like a recipe for disaster, even the guy who created it doesn't seem like he's convinced it's a good idea. He also mentions several bugs.

Is there another email client with the incredible search capabilities of Gmail (or presumably M2, which I haven't tried) that operates as a stand-alone email client? How good is Thunderbird's search function? As fast as Gmail's? Better than Outlook's? I can't imagine anything being WORSE than outlook's search...

[bakedjake]

don't want to switch to Opera

Not to be an evangelist, but why not? It's faster than Firefox, has more features, and you can skin it to look exactly the same.

Ctrl+Alt+L and Ctrl+G are the two most useful SEO tools ever invented.

[peewhy]

I'm always worried about changing old slippers but got really fed up with Outlook. Finally I changed to Thunderbird and I'm delighted with it.

Mozilla gets my thumbs up.

[musicales]

peewhy - do you have the problem I have with the volume of mail received?

Since starting this thread I've had a go with yahoo mail. It's not bad, but one of the main problems is speed of browsing lots of new mails - you have to open each one and load in a new page to view it. Gmail is better in that regard.

Also, I've got quite used to spam bully on outlook which does a fairly good job of removing stuff. So far the yahoo account hasn't spotted one spam mail (I get hundreds a day)

Next I'm going to give thunderbird a go. Anyone know of a spam bully equivalent for thunderbird?

[peewhy]

My morning email count is 1200+.

T-bird has a good spam/junk filter and you can educate it...and instruct it to simplt dump it in a folder.

I check my folder every hour or so because I still find some of my clients' emails are deemed junk. I can live with that.

This transfer from Outlook to Moz is easy and it keeps your address book etc.

I love it!

[MatthewHSE]

Well, I'm not going to be too popular for saying it, but I'm an Outlook user. It can be just as secure as anything else (okay, not quite, but close) if used properly. I would be interested in knowing how big your Outlook .pst file is. If you permanently delete many or most of your messages, you should consider running the "Compact Now" feature a couple times per month.

The points I find in favor of Outlook are that you can handle multiple accounts quite easily, it's simple to export your messages, appointments, and contacts to pretty much any other program if necessary, and it keeps all your data in a single file - meaning recovery can be much simpler in the event of a crash. If you use common sense about which messages to open, when to use (and not use) the preview pane, and use the best-practice principles about unexpected attachments, Outlook can also be quite secure.

I use ThunderBird as well, but after using it exclusively for a month I still couldn't get used to it for my primary e-mail client. (And I don't know why, either - it has a lot of good features that Outlook doesn't offer. It just seemed clumsy to me.)

[peewhy]

It's the cosy old pair of slippers syndrome.

I have to admit, I kept outlook whilst running T-bird until I got used to it and now I couldn't go back to Outlook. I even changed to Firefox and boshed IE.

[danmccarthy]

BakedJake said:

Not to be an evangelist, but why not? It's faster than Firefox, has more features, and you can skin it to look exactly the same.

Ctrl+Alt+L and Ctrl+G are the two most useful SEO tools ever invented.

I say:
The ads. I don't want to pay for a browser, and I don't like ads.

Those two keyboard shortcuts are neat, but for my purposes the web developer toolbar accomplishes both satisfactorily. Admittedly, Opera does make it easier to look at all links on a page. But that's not something I need to do very often.

[musicales]

MatthewHSE- you may turn out to be right - I'm just trying the alternatives. I did clean up outlook and set autoarchives. The file size now is about 200Mb which is quite large but any smaller and I wouldn't be able to access the amount of mail I would like to.

[2by4]

If your outlook is older than the 2003 version it can't store more than 2 gigabytes of emails, doesn't seem to matter if it's archived or whatever, that's a built in limitation. After that 2 gig limit is reached, performance will grow increasingly erratic, and finally just start failing.