Gmail is Better than Outlook
In this article I will discuss and present reasons why Google Workspace is the ideal choice for your new business email service. And also if you have an existing business that's presently on Microsoft Exchange / Outlook.
Note: I use the term “Gmail” loosely to refer to both personal email accounts ending with @gmail.com and to Google Workspace (GW), the business-oriented offering that allows custom domain names. The interface and features for the two are nearly the same.
As is my wont, a bit of introduction and history first.
Outlook is the most popular locally installed email software. It comes bundled with Office 365, which is Microsoft’s productivity suite that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a few others.
And, unfortunately, most businesses use Outlook to access their email, usually on Microsoft’s hosted Exchange product. Outlook is an “email access” product, a reader. It’s not a mail server or service. It’s just the program one can use to read and write emails. Much like Word is used for creating documents or Excel for spreadsheets.
Outlook was first released in Jan 1997. Over the years, Microsoft has upgraded parts of its interface, added features, etc. But in many ways Outlook is still the same. And that’s part of the problem. It has nearly 30 years of code held together with the programming equivalent of duct tape and bailing wire.
I’ve been doing I.T. work for, ahem, a few years now. OK, decades. So I’ve got a pretty good feeling for how software has developed over the years. And that experience has informed me that Outlook today, in a word, sucks. I’ve nicknamed it “Lookout”. QuickBooks also sucks, but that’s another story. I fix more problems with Outlook than with any other single product with the possible exception of HP printers.
Exchange (apart from Outlook), is Microsoft’s enterprise messaging platform. It doesn’t suck, it’s just needlessly complicated for the small to medium business customers that don’t have in-house I.T. staff. Exchange is even older than Outlook, harkening back to April 1996 when software was designed based on business/technical practices and the comparatively limited technology of the time.
Today, most businesses that use Exchange as their email service uses a “hosted” (cloud) variant, as opposed to an "on premises" server as they did in the old days, with Outlook as the way to access that Email.
So what’s the problem with Outlook? And how is Gmail better?
Here’s my more notable reasons why Outlook is suboptimal and Gmail is superior, roughly in order of importance. This list was just off the top of my head. It's by no means exhaustive.
50 GB Limit
Outlook (with Exchange) has a 50 GB limit on mail store capacity. If you are nearing that 50 GB limit then you had better start deleting emails or archiving them to your local computer (not an ideal solution).
If you exceed the 50 GB limit then Outlook will go into “brain fog” mode. That’s when Outlook really loses its marbles; failing to download new email, refusing to send, and generally becoming very grumpy. Trying to fix it at this point by deleting email or moving stuff to an offline folder may be difficult or impossible. You may well need a tech pro to fix it. Pathetic.
One of Exchange’s higher business tiers allows 100 GB of space. But that’s it. You have no other seamless options for increasing your email storage. At least not right now. 100 GB isn't all that much today.
✓ How Gmail is better...
Gmail (both personal and business Google Workspace accounts) allow you to buy as much storage as you would ever need (multi TBs worth). But buying additional storage on GW is almost never necessary. That’s because GW aggregates/pools storage whereas Microsoft Exchange does not.
Each GW user account contributes their storage quota to a common storage pool. In most organizations, there are data “gulpers” and data “sippers”. The gulpers can use more than their individual quota would have otherwise allowed because the sippers aren’t using theirs. Everyone in the company is free to use as much storage as they need as long as the total used doesn't exceed the storage pool capacity. This arrangement works quite well. It's like finishing your partner's steak because they don't want any more but you're still hungry.
Spam Mitigation
Exchange (and Outlook) spam filters are not as robust as Gmail. Exchange has more false negatives and false positives than Gmail. False positives, where legit non-spam is sent to the spam folder is particularly bad. You could miss something pretty important.
I’ve seen examples of properly authenticated legitimate incoming email (sending domain has SPF, DMARC, and DKIM DNS records*) still winding up in the spam folder. Sheesh.
* These DNS records help to improve the reputation of incoming email. It’s one of several important methods to suss out spam and fraud.
✓ How Gmail is better...
Gmail's spam detection is better than Microsoft's. Google is all about search after all, and they apply their considerable search kung fu to helping ferret out spam. That's fewer false positives or negatives. Spam detection is so good that I rarely need to correct it.
Inbox Classifier
Everyone's inbox these days gets cluttered with less important email that can usually be safely ignored. It's not actual spam so it doesn't get sent to the spam folder. But it's not important enough to be immediately visible, either.
Outlook introduced an inbox classifier in 2016 to minimize this clutter by having a "focused" and "other" tab on the inbox. Good idea but insufficiently executed.
✓ How Gmail is better...
Gmail began offering a category tabbed inbox in 2013, three years earlier than Microsoft, and did a better job of it. Category inbox tabs sorts incoming email into as many as five categories: Primary, Promotions, Social, Updates, and Forums. Each user gets to decide which categories they want to enable.
These first four categories are the most useful, classifying what could easily be a deluge of unimportant email into useful categories and out of your direct line of vision. The classifier is quite accurate, again rarely needing to be corrected. The usefulness of this feature cannot be overstated. It’s that good.
Needless Complexity
The (classic) Outlook user interface is steaming mess. There are countless buttons, links, tabs, and utterly arcane features that even most Outlook veterans are clueless about. Most “normal” people use only a tiny number of features. But finding them in the maze of drop-down menus is difficult. The UI is redolent of the 1990's interface design ethos. And why wouldn't it be? Outlook was first created in the mid 90s.
Microsoft could fix this by offering multiple “feature templates” (simple, medium, advanced) that expose increasingly more advanced features only to willing users. But they don’t.
✓ How Gmail is better...
Gmail’s UI is far cleaner and less cluttered than Outlook. There are far fewer arcane features. And yet many people use Gmail without frustration or compromise.
In Gmail, you can reach very nearly every setting and feature with one or two mouse clicks. And when you do reach these setting screens, they make sense. They are intuitive. On the main settings tab, called "general", you can see (and Ctrl-F search for!) among the many settings available.
Gmail was designed from the ground-up with a clean, cloud-centric, 21st century UI ethic.
Custom Rules
Writing email processing rules for Outlook can be a chore. Additionally, if you have 2+ computers (or other devices), each running Outlook Desktop or Mobile, client-side rules (that run local on your computer, the kind you’d usually create) don’t always automatically sync to your other computer(s) or device(s).
You can create server-side rules but if you’re using Outlook Desktop, it’s unlikely that you are because you didn't know you could.
✓ How Gmail is better...
With Gmail, since you'll access email only on a server, there’s no opportunity or reason to create client-side rules. So, all your rules are on the server and therefore apply regardless of whatever computer, tablet, or phone you’re using at any given moment.
Search
Outlook's search function can be slow and not find the thing you are looking for. Search performance can be especially bad on a poorly-specced computer. That is, one with a slow CPU, slow storage, not enough RAM, etc.
✓ How Gmail is better...
Gmail offers a remarkably fast and precise search feature. By using search operators in your search, you can easily narrow down your results to exactly what you need. Granted, you have to learn how to do this, since it's command-driven, but there's a handy Google page that gives you all the operators and examples on how to use them.
This is more versatile than clicking various boxes like what Outlook requires.
To see Gmail's search operators, click here. This is explainer is handy enough to pin to your bookmarks bar.
Synchronization Problems
Data synchronizers in general can be buggy and Outlook's synchronizer is no different. Yes, it usually syncs your email, contacts, and calendar correctly but not always. It can also be pretty slow, introducing a delay between individual items being synced. Good luck finding the orphans of failed syncs.
The thing is, storing email, an inherently cloud-centric thing, on your local device is obsolete these days. Email is the OG of “cloud enabled” services. It’s the first widely used function of the internet even before the word “cloud” entered the lexicon. Email is all about communicating with others, after all.
Decades ago when server storage was expensive, you had a few hundred KB, or maybe a MB or two of server email space if you were some big shot. So you had to download email frequently and delete the server copy.
That hasn’t been true now since probably the mid-late aughts. So there’s really no point in having a local email cache. A local cache, and archives too, can eat up storage space on your device.
Yes, a local cache lets you read and compose (for later sending) email while you’re offline. But other than being in an airplane while in flight then how often are you truly offline these days? The internet is available nearly everywhere. Outlook was designed back when dial-up was still a thing, when you were usually offline. That doesn't happen anymore.
✓ How Gmail is better...
By not having a local mail store, there's no synchronization to cause problems. When you're in Gmail, you're seeing your inbox, live and in real time. You'll see new incoming email within seconds of it arriving. Anything you do in Gmail is visible within seconds on all your devices. No syncing!
It also means no local storage is being consumed which is beneficial on devices that don't have much capacity to begin with, like maybe your phone.
Local OST/PST Corruption
OST=Offline Storage Table : This is where Outlook stores a cached copy of your email, and if using Exchange, your contacts and calendar as well. The main copy is on a cloud server somewhere.
PST=Personal Storage Table: This is where there is no cloud copy of your email, such as when using a POP3 email server, which is pretty uncommon these days. You might also use a PST file to store an archive of older/larger emails when you get near the 50 GB Exchange limit.
The internal structure of the OST and PST are essentially the same. It’s a database file. And it can become corrupt due any number of reasons: Outlook aborts unexpectedly, the entire computer crashes, there’s a power failure resulting in an unplanned outage, or just due to bugs in Outlook. Corruption is quite common if you allow your mail store to hit the 50 GB limit. That’s because syncing between the OST file and the server is disrupted, sometimes mid-sync, and no further syncing is possible. This leads to inconsistency and that's a PITA.
If it’s an OST file (meaning there’s a cloud-copy) that is corrupt, you can usually recover by deleting the local OST file (itself not an easy task) and let Outlook resync everything from the cloud. If you have a large mail store and/or slow internet, that can take hours or possibly overnight. Email is synced one at a time, making it slower than molasses in January.
If it’s a PST file then you had better have a backup. Microsoft has tools that can recover a corrupt OST/PST file but the success rate isn’t impressive.
✓ How Gmail is better...
Since there is no local mail store then local corruption isn't possible. If the Gmail site/app itself is somehow acting up on one of your devices, you can remove the local browser or app profile and login again. Since there's very little to sync (only Gmail's program code), you'll be running again in no time.
Error Messages, Cryptic and Otherwise
There's a philosophy of software development that stresses to avoid displaying error messages. This philosophy goes by several names: Fail-safe design, graceful degradation, resilience, and defensive programming. It means that software should do a better job of recognizing and self-resolving errors. For user-facing products like Outlook, this also means not displaying error messages unless absolutely necessary.
Sometimes an error message can’t be avoided. As a programmer I know that. But many times, error messages are just a lazy way out for a programmer that doesn’t want to spend time and effort writing more resilient code or internal contingency handlers.
Back in my code-writing days, if I found myself crafting an error message to possibly show to the user, then perhaps what I really needed to do is reexamine what would lead the user to see that error and fix the condition instead.
A well-designed product UI avoids error messages if at all possible. In part, that means not offering the user a button, link, command, or option that, if under the present circumstances, would raise an error.
Outlook fails badly on this. Seeing errors in Outlook, both due to system problems (not the user's fault) and the user doing something Outlook doesn't like, is a common occurrence. Indeed, it's difficult to get through an entire day without seeing an error message.
Error messages are frustrating. They break concentration and workflow. The user usually (heh) knows what they want to do! Why is the stupid program complaining? The software should figure out how to do what the user wants instead of throwing a tantrum.
✓ How Gmail is better...
Gmail isn’t like this. It’s pretty dang difficult to force Gmail into displaying an error message. It simply doesn’t present as many contexts where your action could produce an exception that it can’t handle. Gmail's code base is newer and less complex due to Gmail's comparatively spartan feature set and streamlined code. Sure, errors are possible but infrequent. That's what good, resilient, defensive coding can do.
Slower, Especially if you Have a Lot of Email
These days people tend to have a ton of email. More so than ever before, email is acting as a transcript of sorts, documenting your conversations with friends and business associates. It's important to have a record of business commitments, things I have said, and things said to me. I have email going back to the mid-aughts and I'm not alone.
So having many tens (or hundreds) of thousands of emails eating up dozens of gigabytes is not unusual. If any of your folders including the “big three” (inbox, sent, and deleted) have many thousands of emails, then it can take a few seconds to load that folder. If you change the sort order, that too, can take some seconds. If you do that often then it’s a lot of accumulated waste of time.
In these cases, users can wait a noticeable amount of time for Outlook to respond. No software product should ever force a user to wait for anything, especially when all the data is local. If you’re waiting for a response, especially when Outlook itself is not waiting for online data to load, then it’s often due to bad or inefficient code or a corrupt database.
And then there's that 50 GB limit I mentioned earlier.
✓ How Gmail is better...
In Gmail, all your email lives in Google data centers, running on their super fast infrastructure. If your local computer's specs are modest, that could make the difference. With Gmail, your local computer's specs won't matter nearly as much because all the real work is happening on Google's servers.
Occasionally Forgets Your Password
If you’re using Outlook with hosted exchange, which is how most people use it, Outlook will occasionally forget your Exchange password. No rhyme or reason. It just forgets. So you have type it in again. This is minor but annoying.
✓ How Gmail is better...
This one is easy. It doesn't forget your password.
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There are other reasons to switch to Gmail. I can help your organization make that switch. I’ve successfully completed numerous migrations away from whatever (Outlook/Exchange, usually) to Gmail.
Having said all this, the Gmail vs. Outlook/Exchange debate still rages among I.T. people. There are scenarios where Outlook/Exchange might make more sense such as for a large company with hundreds of employees, minimum, that is also heavily invested in the Microsoft enterprise space.
But if you're my client or otherwise reading this, then you are likely a small business without such encumbrances. For you, Gmail would quite probably be the better solution.
