Disassembling Webmail: Gmail Vs Outlook.com
It’s hard to think of email without putting the letter G in front of it. Despite Gmail’s reputation as one of the best email services on the Internet, Microsoft Outlook.com has emerged as a competent competitor over the past few years. In today’s showdown, we checked out these two email giants.
Applicants
There are many postal services out there, but a few have climbed to the top. After Outlook.com took over Hotmail , Gmail and Outlook.com became the two largest email services on the Internet, with more than a billion users in total. Their approaches to managing your email are similar, but there are fairly clear differences in functionality.
- Gmail: Google has been at the forefront of free email since an April Fool’s joke in 2004 turned out to be real . With robust filters, shortcuts, and 15GB of space that can be shared between various Google services, Gmail has successfully made us rethink how email works. As of May 2015, Gmail had over 900 million active users .
- Outlook.com: In 2012, Microsoft launched a new web version of its Outlook email client. Microsoft later moved all Hotmail users to Outlook.com . The fledgling service has tons of unique features including clutter , email rules, and Outlook calendar integration. Microsoft states that Outlook users are limited to 5GB of space, but “ this is slowly adjusting or increasing according to your needs. “Now the service has over 400 million active users . Note. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to this service as Outlook in this article, although Outlook (without the .com) is technically a desktop application . Yes, Microsoft’s names are confusing.
For our comparison, we’ll look at the applications themselves, not necessarily the underlying service. Technically, you can import Gmail messages into Outlook and vice versa, but we are interested in how these services work in practice.
Gmail set the standard for organization, but Outlook caught up
We’ve covered in such detail how powerful Gmail filters are and what you can do with them that we almost take them for granted. In Gmail, you can automatically sort emails by sender, subject or body keywords, attachments, and size. You can then use these filters to automatically mark messages as read, apply shortcuts, reply with generic messages, delete them, and more. In addition, Gmail uses shortcuts and asterisks instead of folders (although it also has fake folders). You can apply multiple labels to your posts, giving you more flexibility in customizing the exact organization chart you like. and the asterisks let you put off your most important emails for later. You can even turn on smart tags so that Google can automatically apply shortcuts such as Finance and Travel.
Gmail also uses a priority mailbox system to automatically find messages it thinks are important to you. Emails are considered “important” based on who you write to, what messages you open, what you interact with, and other criteria . You can also manually mark an email as important to help it absorb the information .
Outlook’s approach to organization is a little more complex. First, the site uses folders as its primary method for organizing your messages. By default, the left pane displays a list of default folders and you can create your own to organize your messages. You can pin emails to stay at the top of the folder, which is kind of like but not quite like the stars of Gmail. Outlook also has a Clutter feature that finds emails you probably don’t need and moves them to a separate Clutter folder. This allows you to focus on important messages and get rid of unnecessary ones in one go.
You can also add categories to your email that work the same way as shortcuts. You can add categories and use them as criteria for rules (more on them in a second). However, by default, Outlook does not display your categories in the navigation bar. To see any categories, you need to go to Options> Layout> Categories and manually select which categories will be displayed. On the one hand, this makes it difficult to clutter up your inbox if you don’t decide it yourself – on the contrary, Gmail shows all the labels, unless you specifically hide them – but on the other hand, it was difficult even to find such an opportunity.
Likewise, the counterparts of Outlook filters are called Rules (a term borrowed from the desktop version of Outlook). When you view an email, you can create a rule to filter such messages. Otherwise, the rules will be buried again in the Outlook options menu. They have many of the same options as Gmail filters, but are not nearly as reliable. For example, you cannot automatically submit a boilerplate response based on a filter. For most situations, however, the rules and filters are fairly comparable.
Outlook has a simplified interface, but Gmail has several layouts to choose from
As you know, Google loves to experiment with the Gmail interface, so you have several options to choose from. Most recently, Google introduced a tabbed inbox view that sorts your email into categories including Social for posts from social media sites, Promotions for sales emails, and Updates for auto-generated emails like order confirmations or invoices. For some, this was a godsend. Others wanted to turn it off immediately . On top of that, Google is also experimenting with Inbox , a third alternative interface for Gmail. Inbox treats your email like a to-do list in which you mark each message as “Done” rather than “Read”. You can snooze emails for later and link related messages together. Between your Inbox, Gmail tabbed inbox, and Normal Inbox, you have many options for choosing how your email is presented.
Gmail also has a ton of settings that are hidden in the “Lab” section of its settings. Here you can enable a ton of useful settings, such as a dedicated Mark as Read button, a preview pane so you can read emails without leaving your message list, and standard replies. While many of these features are great tweaks that may not be needed by everyone, some are also basic features that you probably won’t have to look for to enable in 2016.
Outlook, on the other hand, uses and adheres to a basic three-pane design. On the left, you can click on different folders and categories to navigate. In the middle pane, you will see a list of emails in that folder. Click the letter and you can read it in the third panel from the right. For those using an email client other than Gmail, it should look very familiar. Outlook doesn’t have as many customization options as Gmail, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can still customize the basics, such as where the display pane appears or in what order messages appear in an Outlook conversation.
Finally, there are ads in both Outlook and Gmail, although they look different. In Gmail, you’ll see a couple of advertisements that look like regular emails in the Promotions tab. You can avoid them by turning off the promotions tab , completely disabling the tab “Inbox” or using the folder “Inbox” . In Outlook, ads are entire banners to the side of the screen. The only way (other than ad blockers) to turn them off is to pay $ 20 a year for Outlook without ads. On a positive note, however, Microsoft is promising that Outlook won’t scan your email for ad targeting.
FoGmail has a few bonus tricks, Outlook has a bunch of them.
No email client is an island. Google and Microsoft have tons of other products built right into their email client, which makes them pretty powerful. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll only include services that you can use without leaving directly from your Gmail or Outlook tabs. However, every company has quick shortcuts to a ton of other products, so your decision may in part depend on which apps you use regularly every day.
In Gmail, Hangouts is a bar on the right side of your screen. Every chat you open will open at the bottom of the window. You can collapse them while you check your email and open them to reply to messages. You can also open the Tasks window, which is next to your open conversations, so you can create a basic to-do list throughout the day. You can set due dates and provide descriptions for each task, but that’s about it. In the Labs section, you can enable a mini calendar widget so that you can see a very abbreviated view of your program throughout the day. That’s pretty much everything you can add to Gmail without having to download add-ons to add services on top of Gmail.
In Outlook, you can use Skype for messaging just like Hangouts in Gmail. There is also a Tasks section that can be opened from the context menu in the upper left corner of Outlook. Unlike the Gmail Mini Tasks widget, you can provide a ton of additional information about your tasks, including hours worked, set reminders for a task, and attach files from OneDrive to a task.
In addition to this, Outlook has many add-ons that extend the functionality of your mailbox. For example, you can open the Boomerang add-on to set up a reminder to return to your email after a few hours or days. You can open the Evernote add-on to save the email to one of your notebooks. There are over 100 more add-ins in the Office Store that can add new functionality to Outlook.
Verdict: Gmail is great for power users, Outlook is great for office workers
In the past, Gmail was the de facto standard for email management on the Internet. While Microsoft has done well with Outlook on the desktop, it’s only in recent years that its webmail products have begun to catch up. Now you need to decide which one is better, but each has its own strengths.
If you enjoy endless customization or experimenting with customizing your email , Gmail is for you. Google isn’t shying away from bold and controversial new designs that change the way you use email. Sometimes these experiments work , sometimes they don’t , and everyone has their own preferences. Even if you’re not a fan of change, Gmail has a solid foundation of powerful filters, customizable shortcuts, and automatic sorting, and it gives you tons of room to customize your inbox the way you want.
Outlook, on the other hand, is ideal for anyone who loves a streamlined workflow or uses a variety of professional productivity apps . Outlook puts the most relevant and important buttons where you can see them and allows power users to search for options if they really want to. It also has close ties not only with the rest of Microsoft Office applications, but also with plugins such as Boomerang, Evernote, and others. While Google doesn’t slouch in the productivity department, Microsoft Outlook is best at home in the office.