Should I keep using Outlook or switch entirely to Gmail?

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For more than 10 years Outlook as been my base of operations for email communications.  I loved Outlook.  It was feature rich and it there were third party applications that made it even more useful.  For years my biggest fear was was losing my email either from data corruption or a lost laptop.  About six months ago I started copying all of my email to my gmail account.  In this way I had a copy of all my incoming mail.  That didn’t help with outgoing mail so about 2 months ago I started working in Gmail about 80% of the time.  I think I am just about ready to abandon Outlook entirely.

Now that Google has Calendering, email and an address book it looks like there are fewer reasons to stay on Outlook.  I’m not sure what I’ll do about some of the tools I use with Outlook like Anagram.  That will be one application I’m not sure I can live without.  Send Personally from Mapilabs is another.  Gmail has forgotton attachment protection so that’s an applet I won’t need. 

A major benefit to using gmail exclusively is that all of my mail will now live in the Cloud.  No more worries about hardware failure or lost laptops.   I’m sure there are some new concerns but those don’t seem to worry me as much as the everyday problems encountered when your data lives on one harddrive.  

Google will soon offer Blackberry support via Gmail.  That means syncing of contacts, addressbook and emails between Gmail and your Blackberry.  That alone might justify the move to premium Google Apps. 

Have you ditched Outlook in favour of Gmail?

  • http://winiarz.ca kwiniarz

    I still prefer a desktop client, IMAP and outlook solves the fear of hardware failure.

  • Bret Maukonen

    I used Outlook while in educational institutions but went to Chaos Intellect (http://www.chaossoftware.com) for personal/business use. It was more affordable and has about the same features. The company is responsive to users. I have e-mail to my my 6 Gmail accounts come into the one Chaos application regularly throughout the day. I sync it with my Palm. Switching to Blackberry will cause a re-evaluation of which apps to use. So far, I am happy without Outlook.

  • http://www.johnarobb.com jrobb

    @kwiniarz
    One of the advantages of Gmail is the new Blackberry integration. That is very attractive.

  • http://winiarz.ca kwiniarz

    @jrobb
    No blackberry here ;) iPhone waiting for the Palm Pre to arrive.

  • http://www.doubleentry.co.za Neville

    I have also been an ardent fan of Outlook for years, but I have recently switched to Gmail completely – for two main reasons.

    Firstly, my huge outlook.pst file was starting to creak and I was getting error messages. Even after running the scanpst.exe utility, the errors continued, so I got worried about losing my data.

    Secondly, I work for myself and I am on the move all the time. I have a BlackBerry, which is great for getting and sending emails on the go, but accessing my 13,000+ emails on my phone allows me to access historical emails painlessly and quickly.

    I use the Google Sync application on my BlackBerry to keep my calendar and contacts automatically synchronized between my phone and Gmail.

    All in all, I am very happy to have made the switch from Outlook to Gmail.