Microsoft Outlook 2003 is bloody useless

[Memnoch]

It's a joke! It's slow, bloated, crashes half the time and fails to connect to my Hotmail servers the other half. The biggest waste of space email client I've ever seen.

Why am I using it? I used to use Outlook Express which while primitive and antiquated was actually reasonably fast and had no problems connecting to all my email servers (both IMAP, POP and HTTP) and I never missed an email. But apparently we all need to use MS Outlook 2003 for b-school (mainly because of the Calendar function), so I had to go and migrate all my folders, emails and settings (a nightmarish exercise in itself that requires re-doing about 10 times before everything gets transferred over, even though Outlook and Outlook Express are made by the same bloody company) and since then I've had endless problems, including:

- takes about 5 minutes to load up
- after the 5 mins will come up with a timeout error to one of my Hotmail servers (which needs to be clicked otherwise it holds up everything else)
- constantly can't connect to Hotmail accounts - requires constant repeating before you actually fluke it
- can't change your timeout setting for HTTP servers (which is the advice in the Help Files yet you can't actually do it in the program, funny that!)
- sometimes it goes into a fit and just won't send or receive, even if you repeatedly press the Send/Receive button, it just goes through the process and says "All Tasks Finished" even though you can clearly see email sitting in your outbox. The only solution to this is to close the application and reopen it, then having to wait another 5 minutes for the piece of @#$% to open
- the archiving function doesn't really work (it says its archiving but the archive file doesn't grow at all). I've resorted to manually doing it
- once in a while completely craps itself and hangs my entire system, even though I have 800+MB of RAM

I'd move to Thunderbird in a heartbeat, except that Thunderbird can't access Hotmail servers because apparently they're proprietary and only Outlook can do that.

It's a joke, and totally unacceptable. At least Outlook 98 was usable. Am I the only one having this problem? Anyone know any ways to streamline this?

[philip]

Didn't msn block all forwarding to other programs from free hotmail accounts?

[Memnoch]

Yes, but people who were already forwarding their HM email to Outlook Express or Outlook were allowed to continue to do so.

[Memnoch]

As I type it's just done it again - hanged when click on Send/Receive!!!!! [img]graemlins/madhell.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/madhell.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/madhell.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/madhell.gif[/img]

[Larry_OHF]

I have Outlook 2002, SP3. I got it with Office XP. I did not know that there was a newer version! I know now to stay away from it I suppose. Thanks for the alert, Memnoch the Bostonian.

[Elif Godson]

Do you have all the updates for 2003? I know it is craptastic, especially if you use win2K as the OS since it was designed for XP, my gifs and jpegs are all screwed up now. Not much I can say about streamling it though, I dont have half the issues you do.

[Zebodog]

Outlook is great in a corporate or business environment. For personal use, it's probably overkill.

[philip]

Well it doesn't sound anything near how reliable I want it to be before I'd even consider it a business option.

[RoSs_bg2_rox]

I have Outlook 2003, and have no problems with it. It loads up in a second, and never plays up when sending and receiving vast numbers of emails. Very quick. I copied a lot of records for a business upgrade, and it coped ok with that too.

Not sure what's wrong mate.

[Hivetyrant]

Same here, I use Outlook 2003 all the time now, and although I prefer the layout of 2002 I have never had any problems with 2003 [img]smile.gif[/img]