What is Outlook?

Outlook, included as part of the Microsoft Office suite, is a personal information manager, an Internet mail client, or, when in conjunction with a Microsoft Exchange Server allows for group scheduling and task management for your business or family.

Outlook helps to simplify your life by maintaining all of your e-mail, calendars, contacts, and tasks in one software application as opposed to using separate programs for each of these functions.

The advantages are obvious. Imagine creating a calendar appointment and requesting 3 of your colleagues as attendees. Outlook looks up their e-mail addresses and emails them a copy of the apopintment. If they also have Outlook, they can click "Accept" and the appointment is automatically added to their calendar.

Anyone who has ever tried to receive email on more than one computer using any mail client knows what a pain it can be. There are a few solutions but all of them are irritating and inefficient at best.

The most dominate form of email communication is the POP3 protocal. Using this method, an email client fetches mail messages from a server and stores them locally on a computer. Usually, once the message is downloaded, it is removed from the server.

A problem presents itself when one tries to receive mail on more than one computer. Using POP with default settings, a message is only delivered to one computer when it checks for new messages. Any other computers will not receive that message that was just downloaded.

To remedy this problem, many people enable a feature which leaves a copy of the message on the server after it is downloaded for 'x' number of days. The obvious problem with this setting is that once computer #1 and #2 download a message, there are two copies of the message. If you delete a message on one, it still resides on the other. If you delete 10 new junk mail messages, they'll still be on the other PC. Furthermore, to keep from 'redownloading' messages left on the server, email clients (Outlook included) must keep a record of message that have already been downloaded. If you make any type of configuration change to your mail settings, that record is many times deleted. Then, upon checking for new messages again, BAM: Every message for the past 'x' number of days is redownloaded - including all of those junk messages you had already deleted! Additionally, the messages you hadn't deleted are now duplicated.

To combat POP's shortcomings, many use the IMAP protocol. Instead of downloading messages as with POP, IMAP allows users to store ALL of their email on a server which also keeps track of which messages have been read or deleted. As great as IMAP is, it has two drawbacks. It only synchronizes email, and it's SLOW. Everytime you "Send & Receive" or check for new messages, your PC has to dwonload a list of all new messages in your inbox and each subfolder you chose to check. If you have thousands of email, go make a sandwich.

There is a better way to do email and a better way of synchronizing multiple PCs together. The answer is Microsoft Exchange.