So I have been a long time user of Gmail and many other Google services and recently when the new Outlook.com service was announced I decided to register an email address that way I could claim one before all good variations of my name were taken. With a name like John Jones it doesn’t take too long. Sadly after I did get a rather short email address I never decided to use it for email, rather I just tied my Xbox Live, Zune, and other Microsoft services to it. Well now I have decided to give it a try and rather than just start with a few emails here and there from this account I dove in head first. I moved everything from my Gmail over and now will use Outlook.com as my main email service for the next few days or until I decide whether I’m switching for good or going back to Gmail.

Day one was a bit rough, it did take over a full day of downloading my old emails to Outlook’s servers. I also forgot to turn off my phone from receiving emails as the arrive on Outlook.com, so as it moved every email I have gotten over the past years it kept my phone’s email counter skyrocketing. When I woke up in the morning and it hadn’t even finished the move, my phone had over 18000 unread emails, so I quickly told it to stop fetching emails while I was doing this experiment, otherwise my battery would be drained in minutes.


First Impressions

 

 outlook

Outlook.com –

  • Cleaner looking interface with much less clutter
  • Messaging with integrated Google and Facebook messenger is a nice feature
  • Love the integration with Office web apps and the ability to preview documents (Google previews are often not the best with Office documents, especially if any special formatting was used!)
  • The “Quick Views” function seems like it will be handy once I fine tune it some and get used to that instead of labels
  • Automatic rules are nice, although not radically different that what filters can do in Gmail
  • So far not long enough to tell how well the spam filter works

 gmail

Gmail.com –

  • While not truly an email related service, the first Google service I miss was Google Tasks. (The calendar app on Outlook.com has taks, but a very watered down version. Which saying alot, since Google Tasks are fairly basic themselves!)
  • Gmail does feel and seem to be faster at searching for specific emails
  • I wish I could tell Outlook.com to have the messaging pane open by default like it is in Gmail so I can quickly see who is online.

 

Other than these few minor things, so far Outlook.com has been not too bad. I will post an update in a few days after seeing how it goes for a little while.