Maybe I have some magical copy of Outlook 2007. It's never crashed on me once. It's not speedy, by any means, but it stays loaded all the time, and once loaded (which isn't that much slower than firing up Firefox and loading Gmail) it's pretty responsive. Search is good now too, though I'd still give Gmail the win in that category.
Organizing by folders is a clear win for organization. Note that it is the #1 gripe about Gmail by far. Searching is well and good, but humans are visual animals. Clicking through your tree and simply seeing what you have there allows you to use it, to some extent, like a to-do list (especially combined with marking for followup) while keeping your inbox clean. If you polled all power-emailers, I'd guess at least 9 in 10 would tell you they want folders.
Rules on Gmail are incredibly limited relative to the ones on Outlook. You can only do a few basic things (which granted, covers 80% of what you want to do).
I don't want to have to Google around for various contact sync applications which may or may not be up to date, have to be maintained, etc. I want it to just work trivially, out of the box, the way ActiveSync and Blackberry do.
The difference between IMAP/POP on a phone and push+Exchange is like the difference between masturbation and sex.
Outlook has unlimited storage, as does Exchange server. You can't criticize it for storage simply because some corporations limit it. It's vastly superior there.
My Exchange account has a Barracuda spam filter, which despite it's hideous UI does the job better than my Gmail account. Gmail generates way too many false positives.
So no, I think I had it just right, which is exactly why Outlook costs money but people continue to pay it.
Organizing by folders is a clear win for organization. Note that it is the #1 gripe about Gmail by far. Searching is well and good, but humans are visual animals. Clicking through your tree and simply seeing what you have there allows you to use it, to some extent, like a to-do list (especially combined with marking for followup) while keeping your inbox clean. If you polled all power-emailers, I'd guess at least 9 in 10 would tell you they want folders.
Rules on Gmail are incredibly limited relative to the ones on Outlook. You can only do a few basic things (which granted, covers 80% of what you want to do).
I don't want to have to Google around for various contact sync applications which may or may not be up to date, have to be maintained, etc. I want it to just work trivially, out of the box, the way ActiveSync and Blackberry do.
The difference between IMAP/POP on a phone and push+Exchange is like the difference between masturbation and sex.
Outlook has unlimited storage, as does Exchange server. You can't criticize it for storage simply because some corporations limit it. It's vastly superior there.
My Exchange account has a Barracuda spam filter, which despite it's hideous UI does the job better than my Gmail account. Gmail generates way too many false positives.
So no, I think I had it just right, which is exactly why Outlook costs money but people continue to pay it.