I am experimenting with Outlook for an email client at work. Hithertofore, I have resisted this, but due to shared calendaring it seems prudent to switch. I have always avoided Outlook up until this point for the following reasons.

• pst files are propietary, and I like open formats
• searching was far too slow, and didn’t have many options, unlike mutt + grepmail
• can’t archive / prune email as easily as I can with mutt and some cron jobs
• prefer fetchmail/procmail/spamassassin stack on linux for sorting and processing
• email virus issues

While Outlook 2003 has better spam filtering, I found much better results with spambayes.

Then today I found the product that used to be offered by a ISV, Lookout. It’s an indexer/search interface for Outlook, which seems very slick. Download it from the msn sandbox and try it yourself.

I have been looking at the API’s for Outlook to convert to mbox format for archives. If I can get that all working, I’ll have a working solution that allows me the luxury of shared calendaring.

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