Comments on: The "Why Outlook 2003 Sucks" Challenge

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:08:28 +0000

I finally dropped Outlook and went with Thunderbird. No more locking up, failing to sent mail, failure to receive mail. Trashing Outlook has saved me immeasurable time and frustration. I originally thought that the problems were with yahoo mail, but as soon as I started using Thunderbird, the problems went away. And all the Outlook files were pretty seamlessly migrated as well.

By: cannot start outlook - invalid xml error

cannot start outlook - invalid xml error — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:27:20 +0000

When you get an email with a hyperlink in it, and click on it, it takes much longer than you’d expect to open that link in your web browser. Sometimes, it takes so long that some kind of timeout occurs, and Outlook fires up some kind of “help me find this content” dialog box, which is basically like a file -> Open dialog box. I mean, I’ve just clicked on a link to a *web page*, how am I supposed to find it in a folder on my own hard drive?

By: Petetm

Petetm — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:45:27 +0000

I’ll take Notes over Outlook ANY DAY !!!!!!

By: James Beaver

James Beaver — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:30:15 +0000

I have had Outlook 2003 on about a dozen different computers. On half of them Outlook does not block any spam at all. You can add all of the emails to the block senders list you want (I have thousands on the list), Not one of them gets filtered to the junk email as it should. It ignores the list Microsoft won’t help. Their help menus are for fools. They never give any specific answers. They want you to buy 2007 Outlook to fix the problems. Outlook 2007 sucks worse than 2003 and if you cancel your TRIAL copy, it leaves crap all over your computer. These software companies are a bunch of thieves, releasing new packages every year or every other year and then not supporting the old stuff. Die Outlook Die. What the hell ever happened to Lotus Notes. It was the only mail program I ever had that always worked right.

By: LotusNotesUser

LotusNotesUser — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 01:09:07 +0000

Please do not complain about Outlook until you have used Lotus Notes!! If you think that Outlook is bad, just try Lotus Notes for a day. I dare you!!!!!

By: Klasch

Klasch — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:50:02 +0000

I just say: Lookeen instead of Outlook search!!!!! Its much more faster, more accurate, easier etc etc.!!!

By: Yani

Yani — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:51:05 +0000

I use Endnote with Word… I can’t send an email using Word as the editor without having endnote insist on starting. So now I’m stuck with having to use that suckhole editor inside Outllook.

But at least I don’t have to use a fricken Mac. I’ve never been that good a walking on my hands.

By: tayls

tayls — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:47:58 +0000

it’s not just outlook… everything about windows is garbage. i have to troubleshoot windows problems daily at my office, but the only non-windows computer (mine) just keeps going and going…

By: Dan L.

Dan L. — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:27:00 +0000

Sorry I meant ScrollLock key, not NumLock for that utility I’m looking for..

By: Dan L.

Dan L. — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:24:58 +0000

Yup…it clearly sucks. Mine (Outlook 2003 on XP) will hang forever on a fast P4 machine. Crashes often. And at work Outlook 2007 on Vista is also terrible. Hangs forever despite a smoking fast Core2Duo machine with tons of memory and nothing else running. I can open apps as fast as I can click on that machine and outlook still gums up the works.

And the hotmail ‘support’ is laughable. It’s so slow it’s painful. And it fails to connect 1/2 the time, and get those annoying pop-ups asking me to re-enter my password (I’ve probably hit the little save-the-password checkbox about 1000 times in my life) which hangs all else.

It’s a big bloated behemoth. Very powerful, if it doesn’t drive you nuts. I can;t count how many times my system starts acting squirrely and I open the task manager and shut down OUTLOOK.EXE and all is well again.

While we’re on this topic, Office XP on the whole just plain sucks too. Can’t find anything on the newer supposedly-intuitive ribbon interface. The new templates are not that great and some features are missing. I can’t do a sum in a table inside of Word anymore…WTF is that? If SOMEONE can find it, please let me know. What exactly was the problem with Office 2003 anyway that required this upgrade? Oh yeah, BillyG had no excuse to get peopel to upgrade and spend more money…NOW a remember.

And furthermore, while we’re on that topic, Vista is a solution to a problem that nobody had also!! Now, having setup about 5 vista machines at my office, If I were gonna buy a new machine tomorrow I’d probably get XP Pro. THE ONLY BENEFIT OF VISTA THAT I LOVE IS THE (FINALLY) IMPROVED AND RAPID SEARCH FEATURE. They can keep the rest. Somebody who was on The ScreenSavers once (R.I.P.) had a utility that they gave away for the day that did the same thing; it used the NumLock key to activate and had a blisteringly fast search function. I’d kill to find out what happened to that utility. I downloaded it to a machine that had a hard drive failure 2 months later and I didn;t back it up (mea culpa).

I feel much better now….just had to vent….thanks all.

By: MikeW

MikeW — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:38:52 +0000

Outlook 2003 was a PITA on XP, it is a disaster on Vista. All of this related directly to IMAP. On XP, because we had extremely large and complicated folder archives on the server I was willing to live with the frequent lockups as I was sure that they were because of this same folder structure with thousands of archived messages and about 14 separate Inboxes.

But now that I am using Vista, these crashes are happening with a very simple folder structure, a single IMAP inbox, and no e-mails archived on the server – all e-mails are archives locally. This should have made using it much easier, but now, regardless of how long I adjust the timeout period for, Outlook will stop responding everytime I am replying to an e-mail – MID REPLY no less! The entire program freezes and the only thing moving is the annoyingly unending Vista hour-circle. Eventually the program will error with a timeout. Then and only then can I actually complete the reply I was working on and send manually – forget automatic send/recieve…

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:22:26 +0000

This happened:
-The mail-file suddenly got encrypted in my pc, and I am not able to access it by any password/username. But hey as all BillSoft crappy progs work… they work in one pc and not in another… So folks I really am able open the crypted file in my friends pc with same outlook version (2003), no password/username ! This really sucks big time !

-Thunderbird+Firefox rules forever !

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:55:15 +0000

I got a free copy of Office 2007 at a Microsoft developers’ convention a while back. Installed it and immediately thought, “Gee whiz–this is kind of cool.” Within three months, I was seriously sick of it, getting far less done in far more time, and missing the simple functionality of Office 2000. I dumped 2007 and went back to 2000. What a relief. Sometimes you just need to leave well enough alone–or at least tweak it in a more minor way. I guess the folks at Microsoft have never heard the K.I.S.S. rule.

I recently gave 2007 to my Dad. I wish him all the luck in the world with it.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:32:36 +0000

I sure hope you haven’t upgrade to Outlook 2007. It is MUCH MUCH WORSE than outlook 2003. I’m like, why the heck did I upgade to dual core if Outlook still manages to freeze my computer when retrieving POP3.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 00:24:41 +0000

Oh, sorry about the fowl language.