> Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that.

Outlook may be a fine program for some types of office work but its MUA is one of the absolute worst mail programs in existence, surpassed only by certain webmailers and a collection of weird mobile apps handset manufacturers are probably paid serious money for shipping pre-installed on their (low-end) devices.

I have never seen a mailer being so actively destructive to email. The only times I receive mail that is more garbled and/or broken than that from Outlook users are the creepy web and mobile apps described above.

I have no idea whether all of this is the result of configuration errors on the user side. Maybe it's actually possible to configure the Exchange/Outlook combination to behave in a sane way. If so, this knowledge appears to be awfully rare among the Outlook- and Exchange-using population.

> Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that.

> You aren’t going to out Office Microsoft that is just a fools errand.

Having used Outlook for a while, even on Windows, I'm shocked that people describe Outlook as good.

It may be the least worst, but Outlook is, being generous, a very mediocre piece of software. That's Microsoft's strategy in a nutshell: be Good Enough for a very large audience.

> Also by essentially building a client for Exchange you are putting your product at the mercy of Microsoft that can change their APIs and protocol on a whim and even block 3rd party clients with their EULA all together.

That used to be true, but they're far more constrained by their installed base these days.

> That's Microsoft's strategy in a nutshell: be Good Enough for a very large captive audience.

Outlook is wonderful when compared against the competition, specially when you are unlucky enough to use Lotus Notes as alternative.

They probably shouldn't try to compete so generally. "Better business email than outlook" is a very very difficult challenge. "Better tools to help developers who prefer Linux on the desktop function in a company committed to Microsoft" seems like a real market, but one far too small for a big company. That's the type of market that might be a great starting point for a startup.

I would say it is one of the most _feature complete_ email client, but I don't think it is a good email software. I've seen it crash too many times at the worst possible timings, and, latest updates have rendered almost unusable without patching on Mac for Exchange enterprise users (I even had to make a script to disable Outlook autodiscover on all our corporate macs because from 16.12 version and up it started trying to go to office 365 to authenticate a local exchange account...) Opensource or not, I thank every company who thinks of linux as a target where it can invest. Let's face it, proprietary software needs to be in linux too if linux can eventually gain marketshare in the client landscape, and given the state of Windows 10 and its spyware, and all the big problems with MacOS since 10.10, any help to increase linux adoption out of server and embedded platforms is welcome. I will give this a try tomorrow, using linux at work and having no choice but to use evolution to get access to Exchange I think my use case is exactly the target client:)

Office for Mac has been a shitshow for years, either use 365 online or use the windows one through parallels et al.

Outlook was designed and built in an era were just a few emails were ever sent/received in a day. It does not cope well with the deluge of mails common to today's corporate world. I think there now is an opportunity for other players here, as Google have shown.

> Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that.

Are we talking about the client that sent the plaintext for encrypted emails along for half a year?