DIVID Technology Riffraff & Whatnot

Despite Google’s best efforts with Wave, e-mail is still one of the main communication channels in modern business. We all use some variant of POP or IMAP for casual e-mail, but offices commonly utilize Exchange. Disclaimer: These notes are from my personal experience and may not adequately reflect the views of others.

If you’re on Windows, stop reading here. I’m on a mac (boat!) so choosing an e-mail client at work has it’s woes. Even with the latest OS X 10.6 native Exchange support has left us wanting just a bit more. I’m not sure if the disconnect is with Microsoft’s protocol exposure or what, but the end result has been that Mail.app in Snow Leopard is useable and mostly pleasant but still lacks a few features that can become a nuisance.

Calendars
Using Apple Mail, iCal will serve as the scheduling agent, and optionally integrates with Exchange. It does not, however allow you to choose how you reply to meeting requests or if at all. That’s probably the biggest issue. There are third-party utilities that try to alleviate this problem but aren’t a replacement for what should be built-in functionality IMHO. Just beware if you go dragging around appointments willy-nilly. Adding other Caldav or Gmail calendars is a no-brainer and works flawlessly. Outlook doesn’t support other calendar types.

Messages
We’ve all tried the fancy signatures. Well don’t. At least if you’re using Apple Mail and planning on sending e-mails to the rest of the world. Those who use Windows will see some random 2k attachments with all your fancy sig handiwork, which isn’t as svelte as you may have intended. Choosing the default encoding doesn’t seem to help, and even that isn’t a visible option in Mail preferences. Just K.I.S.S. or use another e-mail client.

Handling messages is done well with either Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook for mac, but we’ve seen a few differences to point out. First, the POP/IMAP support in Apple Mail is superior to Outlook, and we’d expect this is due to the apparent rewrite of the latest Outlook version, which was ported from Entourage in the previous version. While the performance of the rest of the Office 2010 is superb, the mail client still doesn’t match up to the refined OS X Mail app. If you’re interested in control and performance, Outlook isn’t your friend. Another thing the native client does well is rules and handy features like RSS support and system-wide todo lists.

Compatibility
While I lamented the performance of Outlook compared to Apple Mail, the compatibility may be easily outweighed by how efficient it is at delivering your messages in the intended format. You can attach things without worrying if they will be received in the same manner, and can rest assured that meeting responses and requests will be handled well. The IMAP support is a little sketchy with Gmail because folders may get duplicated or corrupted, as did mine. So apart from not supporting other calendar types than Exchange and not handling other types of e-mail well, the Outlook client aces at least one portion of the compatibility tests.

So, after a happy trial with the latest from the mainstream, I’m going back to my less than perfect support for Exchange and happily dealing with the two workarounds (calendar responses and attachments) necessary to be a good netizen in our work environment, and enjoying the great performance and better compatibility for the rest of my connections on the web. Web apps like OWA and Gmail also handle these issues in their own right, but aren’t as state aware or persistent and archivable as a desktop app. To each his own, just my 2¢.