I am an email client snob. I demand that my email client gives me the following:

1) Proper reply header/attribution control: no top posting, selective quoting, auto/manual rewrapping of long lines in quoted text if required.

2) Word wrap. While format=flowed is nice, I want to see nicely formatted paragraphs (

3) Easy enable/disable of HTML messages (plain-text part higher display priority to those clients that love sending multi-part HTML/plain text), reply to HTML as plain text only.

Three rules that keep me happy. And yet, both Outlook 2010 and Thunderbird fail on a number of levels. Let’s start with Outlook 2010. This is a popular email/calendaring/groupware client that’s been around since the stone age, and despite that, Microsoft have still completely failed to understand Internet standards and has failed to listen to customers regarding some of the most basic functionality of text transmission.

For starters, Outlook 2010 still only top posts. That is, it’s reply header consists of at least five separate lines before you get to the quoted message. There is absolutely no way (without having to delve into Macros, and those that I’ve come across have been woefully inadequate) to adjust that reply header. You could switch on the > quote prefix within the Reply Settings section of Outlook’s options, but you still have to do significant manual trimming to get it anywhere half decent. This is WRONG. People have been (rightly) bitching to Microsoft for years about this, and they still don’t listen/can’t get it right. I’d really like to hear from Microsoft why they think their version is better and why they don’t offer their customers a custom reply header system. IRONICALLY, however, their Mac Entourage email client gets it right. Single line reply header and decent quoting system. Sadly, Entourage is to become Outlook on the Mac, and I fear that it’ll adopt it’s Windows brain-dead reply system.

Outlook 2010 still seems to send out emails with extremely long lines that show up in Thunderbird as hideous unwrapped single lines. There’s a problem somewhere. Is Outlook actually sending out messages properly? Is Thunderbird incorrectly interpreting Outlook’s mess? I’ve not looked deep enough yet, but I suspect blame can be had on both sides on this one. Thunderbird is incapable of automatically wrapping quoted long lines unless you hit the Rewrap key (CTRL-R on a PC, CMD-R on a Mac). There should be an option (or Thunderbird extension) that does this automatically. I can’t tell you what an absolute pain in the arse it is having to CTRL-R each and every time messages from Outlook and other equally brain-dead email clients.

And while the internet is big enough to support HTML in email transmission, it still can be absolutely fugly having receiving email from somebody whose gone overboard on stationery making it bloody difficult to read anything they’re written. Or massive HUGE logos displayed in the signatures of email, courtesy of HTML tags. Outlook 2010 is still stupid in that if you hit reply to an HTML email, it’ll use HTML/rich-text text for your reply. I can understand WHY this is so, but nonetheless I don’t want to be forced into it. If there is an option to disable this, I have yet to find it, or make it work.

Right now, the only true email client I like is Apple Mail. It does everything I want without fuss. It’s not perfect by any means, but it works marginally better than Outlook and Thunderbird put together. If Apple would consider making this available for PCs (as it has with Safari and iTunes), I’d be a very happy man. Sadly I’m not going to go out and buy another Mac for the home simply because of Apple Mail.

In the mean time, I’ll attempt to pester Microsoft to add better reply functions to it’s email client. Outlook 2010 is generally a far superior product to it’s predecessors (as is Thunderbird 3), but at it’s heart – it’s text handling/reply capabilities – it’s still stuck in the late 1990s.