8/14/2008
Battle of the Titans – Google Gmail vs. Outlook
Image by Getty Images via DaylifeAbout a month ago I switched email clients from Microsoft Outlook to Google Gmail. Having used Outlook since the beginning of time, this was a major switch, and I wanted to give myself time to adjust before comparing the two products. If you’re thinking of switching one way or the other, perhaps this post will help you reach a decision.
1. Biggest difference for me is folders (Outlook) versus labels (Gmail). With Outlook, every email can be put into a folder for archiving purposes. The pitfall of this is “folder creep”. I had so many folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders it became sometimes impossible to find a particular email. With Gmail, you can attach one or more label (like a tag) to a particular email, but they are archived all in one big lump. I like the fact you can assign multiple labels to an email, because it gives you more than one easy way to find a particular email if you’ve forgotten how you classified it. I think it’s easier to change label structures in Gmail than to change folder structures in Outlook – can anyone shed light on that?
2. No spam in Gmail. Nada. Zero. Life is good.
3. No system freeze with Gmail so far. With Outlook, the problem was ongoing.
4. Gmail lends itself to social networking. You can upload your entire Gmail contact list into Facebook or Twitter or whatever and search for friends. It takes all of about two minutes. You can chat with other Gmail users when they using Gmail, and probably a whole bunch of other things I haven’t had time to explore. How do you use Gmail for networking?
5. Gmail consolidates email strings (Google calls them conversations) into a single, expandable email, and displays the number of individual emails contained in the conversation. I’m not sure if I like that. With Outlook, each email stands on its own, so while you have duplications in your inbox, it’s always clear what you’re looking at when you open an email. With Gmail’s conversations, it took me a while to figure out how to expand and contract the display, and I’m still not sure how to delete one email within a conversation as opposed to the whole thing. Similarly, I’m not sure who I’m replying to in a conversation that has multiple senders and receivers that change from one email to the next.
6. Manipulating Microsoft Office files is easier in Outlook than in Gmail (big surprise). I miss being able to open a Word Document and instantly send it to an email recipient. Can’t do that in Gmail as far as I know. When you receive an Office document in Gmail, you have the option of downloading it or viewing it as an HTML page. Although downloading takes a bit of extra time, I am finding that it forces me to do something with the document. In Outlook, it’s easy to view a document, close it, and just let it sit with the email forever. But once I’ve gone to the trouble to download it, I have to save it somewhere – usually in the place I should have stored those Outlook attachments in the first place.
7. Adding and updating contacts is a breeze in Gmail and Outlook. Outlook gives you more fields of information to store, but Gmail has some slick features. For instance, Gmail suggests new contacts by displaying email addresses you’ve sent mail to that aren’t set up as contacts. Click on one of them, and the new contact is all but set up. You can also view an existing contact and pull up recent conversations with him/her. Very handy – another way to find archived emails.
8. With Outlook, you can set up multiple signatures. With Gmail, it appears you are limited to one. This is a major drawback, one which Google should address.
What do you think?
To me, these are the striking differences between the two email systems. What have I missed? Do you prefer one over the other, and how come?
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26 Responses to Battle of the Titans – Google Gmail vs. Outlook
Brad,
in the office our offical mail client is outlook. I’ve got the impression that it is rather clumsy, but that may be according to the limitations set up by our computer department. At home I’ve changed from yahoo to google and I am glad that I did it. It’s the possibility to label e-mails which I find very nice, being able not only to assign one label but as many labels as you want to one post.
There is one thing which I miss with Google: sometimes you’ve got an e-mail address on a website. With outlook you can click on that and then you start with your e-mail, address having been inserted automatically. This can’t be done with Google. You have to copy and paste, which takes time.
Ulla
One great advantage of Gmail is that you can also use dynamic email addresses. This can allow you to see if your email address was sold or distributed by a company. email hidden; JavaScript is required will still come to youremail! It’s a fantastic feature!
I’ve never tried Gmail but have always wondered how it compares. Outlook is the standard at every office I’ve ever worked, so it’s not a question of choice. I’ve heard folks complain about Outlook freezes, but I’ve never seen it. Maybe our IT folks really ARE are on top of things. Or very lucky.
So far my personal email is handled quite well with Yahoo, since I don’t get that many anyway. I guess once I’m rich and famous that’ll change.
Anyway, thanks for the comparisons; I’ll be listening to see what others have to say.
Douglas, This feature does sound fantastic, but I’m not following how it works. If you have time, I hope you can explain for me, a tech challenged Gmail newbie.
Robert, Several of my family members use Yahoo and swear by it. Some of them are heavy users, so I’m sure Yahoo is scalable as you become the next Paris Hilton. (I know you’ll like that comparison!) My concern about Yahoo is … is there going to be a Yahoo? If it ends up getting bought by Microsoft, will its mail service be “Outlooked”? Or who knows? Maybe Yahoo will end up part of Google or just fade away. Considering Yahoo’s volatile situation, I didn’t really consider it as I searched for an Outlook alternative.
Sure Brad! Let’s say you want to sign up for info from Verizon. You can sign up with email hidden; JavaScript is required. This will allow you to track all emails from verizon (and you can use the filter feature in gmail to really organize your email). If you ever get spam from some third party to email hidden; JavaScript is required, you know that they’ve given your email address to a third party.
It works with Google Apps as well!
On the blackhat side, it can also be used for evil. Let’s say you want to vote for your blog because it’s the greatest in the world. You can vote with email hidden; JavaScript is required, email hidden; JavaScript is required, email hidden; JavaScript is required, etc. Basically, Google ignores everything between the + and the @.
Douglas, AHA! Now I get it. On the privacy front, that is really incredible. Is that feature unique to Gmail, and does Google market the feature aggressively? Seems like it would be very attractive to privacy-minded individuals, an ever growing number. On the blackhat issue, that’s quite a loophole. I wonder how much it’s being used and abused … Thank you so much for the education!
It’s definitely unique to Google. They marketed it when Gmail first hit the streets, but not much since. I work for a Marketing and eCommerce company and love it because I can test over 100 different sites and have all of the results filtered by client.
Welcome to the Googlies! I too abandoned ship w/Outlook within the switch from corporate life to entrepreneurship, and remember how much it took for me to get accustomed to also changing my calendar and no longer using Outlook’s TaskPad (I had the GTD App woven into it as well.) I became a true convert in about 4 months time, and now have all my domain mail managed by the Googlies too. At first my goal was primarily the web-based mobility, for when you leave corporate life you leave all the IT guys you took for granted behind, and the company network. As I began reading productivity blogs GMail advice (and hackery) was easy to find, and I figured I’d never be able to afford a better team of my own than blogging productivity geeks and the Googlies.
Brad, about your #5, the baseline assumption w/GMail is that you don’t delete, just search. I only delete immediately (and mostly automatically via filters), i.e. when I am sure a conversation will not ensue.
Ulla, I can do what you say you are missing… perhaps when you tried it on a particular site the html mailto coding wasn’t done correctly by the webmaster?
Hi Rosa, Your experience is reassuring. Search don’t delete …. hmmm … paradigm shift! I haven’t been thinking that way, and explains why I keep losing emails. Your comment has saved me hours of frustration!
Brad, I should have added… i.e. when I am sure a conversation will not ensue, and I archive everything (removing it from my inbox) when I have dealt with it (by label or star: I use GMail stars as an electronic to-do list).
I like the empty inbox discipline in theory, and in actual practice I have it down to 12-20 emails pending in my inbox per day. Nick Cernis has a pretty good article here on a GMail practice he calls Inbox Heaven: The Ultimate Email Setup.
Have you been using GCalendar too?
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Rosa, you are becoming my GGuru! I haven’t used stars or GCalendar … but it sounds like you like both. Must check them out! Nick’s article is fantastic. I read it a while ago and it should be on everyone’s list of must reads.
Outlook was OK when it came out, but it really hasn’t kept up in a lot of the ways that we use Email today.
Although, I use Google Mail as the backend for my mail needs, I still use Outlook as the front-end via IMAP. I lose a lot of the tagging and threading functionality available on the Gmail Windows Mobile and Web clients, but Xobni makes up for the shortcomings of the Outlook OOBE. Check it out!
Brad, I may the switch from Outlook to Gmail in February thanks to Nick’s article! You can open attachments in Google (Google Docs) and read and even save as a a Google Doc (which allows others to collaborate online, I have come to love this feature!) I also use gmail to manage all of my email addresses. For a to-do list, Remember the Milk has a Gmail plug-in. I also use I want Sandy, who tweets me reminders. Outlook crashed a lot so I don’t miss that at all.
Hi Brad – I used Outlook in my old office but always continued to use AOL at home – just a bad habit I guess. The amount of spam I get is beyond control and I really need to move. The no spam with GMail has definitely won me over. It’s just getting round to it.
John, I’ve heard about Xobni but had no idea what it does until now. Thanks for the tip!
Karen, Nick’s article has influenced scads of people, hasn’t it? Google Docs is a great tool, but some of my clients are just too comfortable with Office to try it. I never heard of Sandy or Milk either, but here’s a post that compares them – http://tinyurl.com/3bcvb3.
Cath, Let us know how it goes. Every day I feel more comfortable with Gmail after those years of Outlook, if that helps.
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Another major question I have in order to make a decision to switch from outlook to gmail is with outlook I can send an email to my entire list in seconds before I switched to outlook I used yahoo online mail service and it was always a pain. Anyone know if we can send many emails at once with out trouble with gmail?
Carenna, You can do that pretty easily by using Groups for your contacts. Not sure how to send an email to all contacts in gmail, though.
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Thank you very much. you fully explain the difference between Gmail and outlook. it is very useful to me to having a good concept in these two appliction.
OK. It’s been nearly 3 years since you first posted this article. Are you still as jazzed about the switch from Outlook to Google? I’m just now switching and am having some problems. Wondered if this is still the way to go. Thanks.
Hi Bonnie, Yes, I’m still really happy with Gmail. Our agency uses Outlook, so I’m back to two systems, but that just reinforces my opinion that Gmail is better. All systems have weaknesses, though, and I hope you are able to work through your issues.
Gmail is the email of choice by my new employer and it is frankly driving me crazy. I am a heavy user of email / attachments and really miss the flexibility Outlook has to open documents and forward from inside the MS office document;create a spreadshee and send from within the spreadsheet. Did this all the time.
Also, with Gmail it seems you can’t have more than one email open at once so if you want to look something up in a difference email, you lose your place where you were at – or it saves it to the drafts folder and then the new message is way down at the bottom so you have to scroll down to get to it. Then it is in a small little window box, rather than the full screen to begin with.
I do like the labels, but to be honest, I didn’t have huge issues finding things with Outlook.
With the message strings, I find that it conbines emails so if two emails come in from two different people with the same subject, it is easy to miss one of them because they stack.
In Outlook, it told me if I already replied to an email. That was handy.
Sorry, just not coming up with the positives to stick with Gmail. Considering asking IT to load Outlook on my machine.
If anyone knows how to overcome some of these time wasters with gmail. I am all ears. My staff all are heavy with attachments as well and it is just not efficient.
Rose
Hi Rose, This post was written a few years ago. Since 2008, Google has done surprisingly little to enhance Gmail, and in my opinion the recent design “upgrade” worsened the user experience. I still use Gmail for personal email but our agency uses Outlook. Other than the labels versus folders issues, Outlook seems like a better enterprise solution at this point.