Moving from IBM Lotus to Microsoft last year, one of things I thought I might find troublesome after 19½ years was leaving dear old Lotus Notes behind and adopting Outlook. I needn’t have worried, as I took to Outlook like a duck to water. This post may gather some comments about the merits of both in terms of features, but let’s put it out there now. Notes has some features that are not in Outlook. Outlook has some features that are not in Notes. Some features are in both products, but operate in a different way.

Yes, I do miss a few features in Notes, but there are plenty of things in Outlook which compensate for the odd missing feature (to be discussed another time). The feature I was missing most was the Notes ‘attention indicators’… those little blobs which told me whether the e-mail was only sent to me, me and a few people, or if I was copied. Notes zealots rejoice… Outlook doesn’t have that feature out of the box. But you can recreate it, or something like it.

The ability to create this feature is based on a) Outlook’s ability to categorise e-mails and display a coloured rectangle, and b) mail rules. The basic premise is that a set of rules will process incoming (or existing) e-mails and apply a category accordingly.

So first you need to create some categories… I created three named as follows and selected a colour:

1. E-mail just to me (dark blue)
2. E-mail to me and others (orange)
3. I’m just in the cc: field (yellow)

Then I created three rules. The first is named ‘Sent only to me’ – the condition is a simple selection from the list, ‘sent only to me’. The action for the rule is to assign to a category (#1 above). I then added some exceptions, basically to ensure that the category isn’t assigned to calendar entries – so I selected ‘except if it uses the form’ and then selected the calendar notice types (accept, appointment, decline, cancellation and request). To finish I added a name for the rule, selected for it to be active, and also selected the option for it to run the rule now on messages already in the inbox.

The second rule checks for e-mails sent to me and other people where my name is in the To field. The rule differs slightly… the condition is ‘where my name is in the To box’, the action is to assign a category (#2), and an extra exception is ‘except if only sent to me’. This ensures that the rule runs on e-mails where I’m in the To field but I’m not the only person.

The third rule highlights e-mails where I’m in the cc: field, so it’s the same as the first but the condition is ‘where my name is in the Cc box’.

Bear in mind that Outlook can run rules over existing e-mails (I don’t think Notes can) so you can run these rules over your entire mail box and see the categorisation. The result is seen in the image above.

My frolleagues Brett Johnson and Steve Green also suggested another way of doing this, based on conditional formatting. This allows the text of the message to be colourised and the font changed based on a wide variety of criteria, including the three situations mentioned above. I’m using this approach to clearly see e-mails from my manager. Brett uses it to colourise e-mail only sent to him as blue, cc:ed e-mails as green, and anything he adds a flag to as red.

During the past week a colleague sent me a link to Campaign Monitor’s statistics on e-mail client popularity. A first glance shows Outlook to be the most popular, Lotus Notes to be absolutely nowhere, and iOS devices to be the strong-performing new kids on the block.

However, it’s very important to look at the way that the statistics have been collected. Campaign Monitor use a request to a remote image in their e-mail, and then can check the type of client that makes the request. Now, this would be accurate if not for three things:

1. Many e-mail clients don’t show remote images by default (it’s a good mechanism for not indicating live e-mail accounts to spammers). Notes 8.x, most versions of Outlook, and Mozilla Thunderbird will block remote images. Typically I won’t load the images if I’m not interested in the content, and I suspect many other people exhibit that behaviour. So many of Campaign Monitor’s e-mails will go unregistered, thus skewing their statistics.
2. The statistics mash together personal and business e-mail accounts. Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, GMail (although Google may argue), Apple Mail, Outlook Express and Thunderbird are predominantly private / personal e-mail solutions. Full Outlook and Notes are predominantly used in business environments. The mobile platforms (iOS, Android) are likely to figure in both sets. All I’m saying is that it would be more illustrative to take a view of the personal and enterprise markets separately. In business Outlook and Notes would outstrip the others, therefore it’s unfair to show Notes with such a small share. For personal accounts the picture would be completely different.
3. Spam filters – are Campaign Monitor’s e-mails getting stopped by spam filters before they get to business users? Maybe, and again that will skew the Outlook and Notes statistics, and probably for the business-used mobile platforms too.

The survey then lists the ‘movers and shakers’ compared to two years ago. The fact that iOS devices have grown most (84.23%) is no surprise, although actually I would have expected more. The fact that Notes has fallen (by roughly the same amount) is also no surprise, knowing what’s been happening in the enterprise market over the past few years. However, I refer to point #1 above – older versions of Notes (and I mean 7 and older) didn’t have the ability to block remote images. Notes 8.x does have that ability. So the same population of Notes users, but with more using Notes 8.x, would show less usage using Campaign Monitor’s method of gathering statistics.

It’s now been five weeks since I became an Outlook user. After nineteen years of using Notes I slipped into it pretty well… yes, there’s a few Notes features I miss, but there’s a big heap of Outlook features that Notes doesn’t have. I’m not really interested in starting a big feature comparison, but feeling the need to blog about something, I thought I’d feature mail tips to start off the Microsoft product blogging.

So what are mail tips? Well, they give you some information about the e-mail you’re about to send.

Have you ever typed out an e-mail, sent it, and then by way of an out-of-office reply discovered that the recipient is away for two weeks? Yep, me too. Mail tip #1 discovers the recipient’s out-of-office status from the Exchange server and shows it to the user, thus informing the user that the recipient is away before they continue to type the e-mail.

Ever accidentally sent an e-mail to a large group? Or maybe you’ve received an e-mail which someone has ‘replied-to-all’ (and thought “what an idiot”). Mail tip #2 informs you that the e-mail is addressed to a large number of people, meaning you (or those other daft users) can be warned in advance about the reply-to-all about to be sent to a vast and probably uninterested audience.

Finally, Outlook and Notes provide e-mail conversation threads, but here’s a really dynamic feature of Outlook. If you reply to an e-mail in a thread, mail tip #3 will warn you if it’s not the most current in the thread. I say this is dynamic because the mail tip will appear even if a new e-mail arrives and joins the thread after you’ve started to compose the reply (thus causing the one you’re replying to to not be the most recent).