Well, I just couldn't stand it any more, not for another day. So last night I moved my email to Thunderbird.

I was very impressed with the Thunderbird import wizard. Just pointed it to my Outlook 2007 PST (500MB file), and off it went. Twenty minutes later, all my mail, contacts book and account settings were in Thunderbird, without a glitch. Message filters don't import, unfortunately, but that's a one-off inconvenience.

I'm sure I'll have plenty to moan about in a few days, but at the moment I'm just enjoying the speed of Thunderbird (relative to OL2007, anyway). Syncing with my PDA will be the challenge...

In another thread (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8734), I praised MS's fine OneNote program, and said it showed just what they can do when they try. On the other hand...

Recently I upgraded to Office 2007, and with it to Outlook 2007. Like many people, I live in Outlook. Which is a great shame for me, because Outlook 2007 is horrible.

The main problem is that it's just slow. Now Outlook has never been sleek and nimble, but 2003 was a pretty good program. Glitch-free, for me, and worked quite well. I am growing old watching emails render in Outlook 2007. It is painfully slow. And when the email finally appears, if you're unlucky enough to open an HTML email....Let me give you just one example.

Here's a daily email newsletter I receive from Variety magazine:

[attachtimg=1]

And since I "upgraded" to Outlook 2007, here's what I see:

[attachtimg=2]

Why? Well, it took some digging to find out, but apparently MS, in its infinite wisdom, decided to stop using the IE HTML engine to render Outlook emails. Now Outlook 2007 uses....MS Word's HTML engine. Really.

A bit more digging, and I found that this is causing plenty of coders endless frustration:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/

Now I know that some of you will say that maybe it's a good thing. Maybe we'll see a return to the good old days of plain text emails. And yes, I'm one of the old timers too - I always send plain text emails. Unfortunately, the commercial world does not, and will not. So email newsletters, invoices etc, all in HTML, and all at the mercy of Outlook's new excuse for an HTML engine.

I wish I could just shrug my shoulders and say "it's time to move on". But Outlook, and its PDA equivalent, are ingrained in my life. It's going to take some long-term planning to move away.

Finally, I inquired about how I would revert to Outlook 2003, while keeping the rest of Office 2007. Apparently I'd have to uninstall all of Office 2007, install Office 2003, then re-install Office 2007 without Outlook. Oh, and mail merge would be broken. And one or two other things as well...

is tagging easy -
i.e. can you use shortcuts in particular - & is it easy then to display only stuff with XXX or YYY Tag

Does tagging work across various "Notebooks" or is it limited?

-tomos (June 01, 2007, 02:07 AM)

I don't think you can modify the built-in shortcuts for standard tags, although I may be wrong. If there is such a feature it's buried.

You filter by tags by selecting the "show all tagged notes" feature and then sorting tags by one of a number of options: