Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Amen brother limo.

Friends don't let friends use Outlook is a fantastic article that espouses the pitfalls of Outlook and the virtues of a great email alternative, Mozilla.

The main issue with Outlook is wasting half the bandwidth on the Internet with e-mail worms and crap that it allows to proliferate. Three out of four virus "alerts" that come down the wire every day arent viruses at all but some other Outlook worm crap that uses Windows scripting or some other nonsense that should not be going on in an EMAIL CLIENT.

Anyway, if you use Outlook, stop it. If you use Mozilla or another good mail client that doesnt flood the world with worms then tell your Outlook friends to do the same.

Oh, and if you use Outlook because you must because of that little calendar and scheduling hook to Exchange (which works well I admit and does not have a clear alternative, especially not client if your server is Exchange, you could remove that server and use IMAP/LDAP of course, but I digress) then make sure you take minimal measures to protect yourself and the bandwidth of the world.

1. DISABLE MACROS in your Outlook (its in the options somewhere, its important, it stops all that windows scripting and other windows macro crap).

2. DONT RECEIVE HTML EMAIL, use plain text only, it will disable spam trackers from hiding gifs in email and etc and it will protect you from lots of other javascript and such crap, this Microsoft does NOT give you the option to do (which should in and of itself make you pissed enough to stop using Outlook) so get the noHTML patch.

3. DONT SEND HTML EMAIL, this also is in the options somewhere, uh, jackass, its EMAIL, use plain text.