Outlook or stick with Yahoo!

[ringway]

I use Yahoo email.

I've always had the full MS Office suite that includes Outlook.

I seem to remember years ago getting a message stating something along the lines of "you do not have a licence to use Outlook" and so never bothered to use that part of Office.

Outlook looks a far better email set up than Yahoo and I'd like to try to use it.

How do I configure Outlook and will I have to ditch yahoo? I don't want to be using both programs.

Are there any foreseeable problems or advantages?

Any advice would be much appreciated.


Paul.

 

[Merc Owner 2B]

Since outlook is an email "client" you can download, view and store all of your emails offline. Yahoo needs web access, but you can view from any pc, anywhere in the world.

They are both quite different animals so depends how you use your mail.

Outlook also integrates with your office diary and contacts if you use these features.

How do you use your mail now?

 

[ringway]

Since outlook is an email "client" you can download, view and store all of your emails offline. Yahoo needs web access, but you can view from any pc, anywhere in the world.

They are both quite different animals so depends how you use your mail.

Outlook also integrates with your office diary and contacts if you use these features.

How do you use your mail now?

Thanks.

I dont use Office diary (I'm sure I should though) and do occasionally view my emails on my mobile phone. I wasn't aware I had any contacts in Office.

I use office primarily for Access and word and email Purchase orders, invoices, quotations etc through Yahoo.

 

[BTB 500]

The Yahoo web client is pretty decent, and I use that at home (even though I have Outlook installed, and also use it every day at work).

One point to bear in mind is that virus writers tend to target Microsoft products, and an email viewed in Outlook has the potential to do all sorts of nasty stuff (without you having to save or open a dodgy attachment).

 

[ringway]

The Yahoo web client is pretty decent, and I use that at home (even though I have Outlook installed, and also use it every day at work).

One point to bear in mind is that virus writers tend to target Microsoft products, and an email viewed in Outlook has the potential to do all sorts of nasty stuff (without you having to save or open a dodgy attachment).

Thanks for the advice Bill.

The attraction to Outlook is that it seems to be a program that has more enhancements (fonts etc) and looks to offer more than Yahoo. Unless I'm missing something, I don't seem to have an audible alert when new mail comes through to my Yahoo account (even Aol had that years ago) and I also have to "update" to check for new mail.

 

[stevesey]

You can configure Outlook to leave the mail on the server (so can access from phone/or via yahoo web client when elsewhere). Setting up outlook as an IMAP client does this (bit also there is an option with POP to leave mail on the server).

A web client is much more limiting - as SWMBO pointed out yesterday when using my laptop on the sofa, you can't just scroll down through all your old mail with a webclient - you have to go one page at a time.

Personally I use outlook with IMAP to connect to our google apps domain (so googlemail)

 

[BTB 500]

A web client is much more limiting - as SWMBO pointed out yesterday when using my laptop on the sofa, you can't just scroll down through all your old mail with a webclient - you have to go one page at a time.

The Yahoo client is pretty good for a web interface, and you do scroll up /down through folders in the normal way rather than paging. You have drag & drop, auto-fill on mail recipient, etc.

But the folder structure is much simpler than Outlook (no sub-folders), searching is not as sophisticated, no 'rules wizard' or anything like that.

Obviously the main technical difference is that none of the data is held locally ... you are going to the server for everything.

Of course Outlook is a much slicker and more powerful product. But I find Yahoo fine for personal stuff. Being able to log in and use all your contacts etc. on any computer with a web browser is a huge plus.

 

[davidjpowell]

The real feature's such as Out of Office come when outlook is joined up with Exchange. It still does the job, but not as comprehensively.

Still I have used it for years and find it better than the web based email service.

 

[crockers]

You can configure Outlook to leave the mail on the server (so can access from phone/or via yahoo web client when elsewhere). Setting up outlook as an IMAP client does this (bit also there is an option with POP to leave mail on the server).

A web client is much more limiting - as SWMBO pointed out yesterday when using my laptop on the sofa, you can't just scroll down through all your old mail with a webclient - you have to go one page at a time.

Personally I use outlook with IMAP to connect to our google apps domain (so googlemail)

Isn't it risky leaving all your email on the server .... have heard of it disappearing over time. I use Outlook as a POP saved to laptop...and back it up often. All other machines (ipod touch and Imac) access mail as Imap so only one machine "grabs" and stores it..

 

[NormanC]

Isn't it risky leaving all your email on the server .... have heard of it disappearing over time. I use Outlook as a POP saved to laptop...and back it up often. All other machines (ipod touch and Imac) access mail as Imap so only one machine "grabs" and stores it..

But you can still leave it on the server even if you dowload it.

I use Outlook with my Virgin mail account and both download and leave a copy on the server. That way I have not only my backup but also the Virgin server copy.

 

[crockers]

But you can still leave it on the server even if you dowload it.

I use Outlook with my Virgin mail account and both download and leave a copy on the server. That way I have not only my backup but also the Virgin server copy.

How do you set a POP account to do that??

 

[Swozza]

I'd think it was an IMAP account

 

[BTB 500]

The real feature's such as Out of Office come when outlook is joined up with Exchange.

True, I was thinking of Exchange server / Outlook client at work.

As an aside, Yahoo does have "Holiday Response" ... aka out of office notification. Also stuff like "flag for follow up", and various other Outlook-like things.

I've never personally lost any mail items from Yahoo, but I agree you can't export to .pst etc. like you can with Outlook.

I think storage is unlimited now, it didn't use to be though ... possibly old items got dropped if you hit the limit then.

 

[stevesey]

How do you set a POP account to do that??

Account settings -> More settings -> Advanced

Always set mine to a nice wide window to allow web-mail access of past 30 days or so on any POP based accounts.

P.S. Make sure your provider doesn't have a very small server space limit, if you do this (not normally a problem if they major in web based e-mail)

 

[stevesey]

Isn't it risky leaving all your email on the server .... have heard of it disappearing over time. I use Outlook as a POP saved to laptop...and back it up often. All other machines (ipod touch and Imac) access mail as Imap so only one machine "grabs" and stores it..

Couple of simple outlook rules to backup a copy of all incoming and sent mail takes care of any worries there.

N.B. The mail reason I use IMAP is so you have access to your sent items from everywhere - using the POP leave on server (indefinately) option means you have access to incoming mail from everywhere - but not the same for sent items.