My experience: Outlook Express and 2003 unable to handle their own mail, Thunderbird does the job

[astanko]

Hi all!

The Outlook Express mailbox-files (dbx) on the computer of my boss got
corrupted and mails started to disappear. So I decided to switch him
to Outlook 2003 because I thought this should be more reliable as part
of the highly-priced "professional" Office 2003 suite and would offer
additional features like calendar etc.

When I installed Outlook 2003 the first problem appeared - its
Outlook.pst file (where it stores all its data) was not in the new
Outlook 2003 format but in the old Outlook 98-2002 format which has a
ridiculous size limit of 2 GB and no unicode support. And I can tell
you - converting to a new outlook.pst is a nightmare and is not
described anywhere.

But the main problem was how to import the mail into Outlook 2003.
Microsoft describes this procedure on its website but does not say
that the sent date of all e-mail will be discarded if you use the
import command in Outlook 2003. This is really poor - the sent
messages are useless if you don't know when you have sent them. So
after many hours of google-searching I finally found out that you have
to export form Outlook Express instead of importing into Outlook 2003
in order to preserve more information.

So I exported from OE to 2003 and there were no error messages, at
least those highly-intelligent pieces of software did not tell me of
any problems. But as expected, when I manually compared the mails I
saw that in one folder there should be about 5000 messages, but
actually there were only 70. Importing into Outlook 2003 (which as I
already said discards the dates and I tried it for testing only) did
not do the job better - it also imported only 70 messages. I came to
the conclusion that there must have been some corrupted messages
inside the mailbox file and when the intelligent export/import process
sees them it just stops converting this folder - WITHOUT saying
anything - isn't that incredible?

So I decided to try the free Thunderbird to import the mail. And I was
amazed because this completely FREE (!) open-source software imported
all messages and folders - from about 30000 there were missing only 5
messages - that were the corrupt messages I think. All other messages
were there and had their dates preserved.

Sorry Microsoft but I cannot imagine how your main products which are
highly-priced and used by so many people worldwide and come from the
same company are not able to do an export / import of their own e-
mails. I don't have time to discuss about the other problems I
experienced with Outlook 2003 (like crashing) without having even used
it. I think you have just lost a few more customers. Please correct me
if I misunderstood something.

Angelo

 

[Marvin P. Winterbottom]

You are mistaken in your original assumption that Outlook is an upgrade from,
better than, or more reliable than Outlook Express. The similar name fools
many people. Outlook is a business collaboration/messaging system for
organizations using Exchange Server, not a more advanced POP3 client.

 

[astanko]

I know that both Outlooks are completely different applications. But
Microsoft should have noticed meanwhile, that many people will want to
transfer their mail to Outlook as soon as they buy Microsoft Office,
because it has more features and is sold as their high-end e-mail
software.

And as a higher-priced business application from the same company one
can expect by default that it should be more robust, more reliable and
more capable than the free Windows add-on. At least this is the case
when you buy software from any other company.

It's a shame that a free Non-Microsoft software like Thunderbird can
handle Outlook's proprietary mailbox format and Microsoft's software
cannot. I just can't imagine how this is possible. But money has
nothing to do with good programming and companies should listen to
user-feedback otherwise they will lose their customers.

Angelo