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GMAIL For Home, OUTLOOK For Business

What got me started on this article is from a Digg article titled “Gmail Destroyed Outlook”. The other is a Windows Weekly podcast #92 where Leo and Paul discuss how Gmail is so better than Outlook. I agree with part of this. Outlook as a home user has its problems.

I use to be an Eudora fan. It would handle multiple email accounts. Had a quick search and there were 2 best parts that made it better than any other. Attachments were saved in a separate folder. Great for virus scan and searching and moving attachments. The second best part is you can grab the entire Eudora folder and move it to another computer or if you were upgrading your PC and create a shortcut to Eudora.exe and it worked. You did not have to reinstall, import email,addresses, email accounts. Lets see Outlook,Outlook express,Thunderbird, etc do this! With this great program there was one major problem. Like all other applications is I could not access my email from another PC either at home or away from home. This is where Gmail comes in.

I got me Gmail account way back when you had to get invited. I did not know anyone who had one but Kevin Rose was on the Screensavers and was giving away other peoples invites. I did not get in time the first round but the second I luckily did before the server crashed or all the invites were taken. I think Kevin has killed more Internet Servers than anyone from this and of coarse Digg. I had a Hotmail account but never thought it was just OK. Gmail rules!! With its huge space (7 gig and growing), fast search, multiple tags, import from many email accounts and the increasing add ons makes Gmail one of the best online email. Outlook with its PST format has an issue when it gets too big it gets sluggish. You fill Gmail up and there seems no slowness and the biggest thing is its available from anywhere. I don’t have to worry which PC has the email on it. When I switch from XP to Ubuntu to Server 2003 my mail is there. Their Spam filter is the best in the industry. When you have 5 email accounts coming into Gmail thats 5 spots where Spam comes in. Rarely does any get into my inbox. The only complaint I have with Gmail is you cannot send/receive .exe attachments. Even if they are zipped. I know they put this in for security and to reduce the virus infections but it would be nice to have an option to turn this on or off.

I love Gmail. Its great but I would not use it at our office. Outlook with Exchange is like 90% of all other businesses. What makes Outlook work is the shared Calendar, Contacts, central email backed up. Its a lot different than Outlook alone with a PST. If you have a laptop you can cache to your laptop and work offline. Similar to Google Gears now. You can also setup web access to your Exchange server. Also I use it to sync to my Blackberry for Contacts and Calendar. Emails are pushed onto my Blackberry. I also have Gmail on my Blackberry so I can access all me email anywhere.

I have way to many email accounts. Work, Gmail, email from ISP, website email,Blackberry ,contract college account and a few others for test purpose etc.

I just want to conclude that if you are a home user or a small business person, without Exchange especially if you travel a lot then Gmail is the way to go. If you are in a Business that has Exchange and all the perks of Exchange then Outlook is the only way to go. My Blackberry basically joins both for me so that I can read and respond quickly from any email application but for the long emails that I need to write I will use either Outlook  or Gmail to get the job done.

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