Goodbye Eudora... Hello Outlook 2007

After 10+ years using Eudora Pro as my email client application, I'm finally moving on. Like so many people, I'm going to be using Outlook. In fact, as of this weekend, I am now switched over to the new Outlook 2007. The reasons for this are several:

1. Eudora hasn't had much in the way of new features added to it in a long time. While I've long liked the program (obviously!), it seems to be falling further and further behind. And as Qualcomm recently decided to stop developing the app and selling it, and instead turn it into an Open Source app, well, I'm not sure whether that will be a good thing for it or not. Afterall, there are already some good open-source/free email clients out there.
2. While I considering going to web-based email, like gmail or hotmail or Yahoo! mail, I wanted loads of features. While those are getting better all the time, they don't compare to a good client app yet.
3. I already had Outlook 2007, since I bought Office 2007 Professional shortly after it was released, as an upgrade for us from the increasingly ancient Office 2000. So starting to use Outlook at this point would only cost me some time to switchover, not any additional money.
4. I like the new interface that Office 2007 provides, with the ribbon and so on. Even though Outlook is a hybrid and still uses the old-style menus interface for the main screen, I wanted to use an email client that uses the new interface for at least some things -- as I really like and will be getting more and more accustomed to it going forward through Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access use.

So in recent weeks I've been cleaning up all my Eudora stuff, preparing for the switchover to Outlook. In doing so I've archived thousands of emails sent and received since 1997, and re-organized how I structure email folders and so on. Having done all of that upfront, the switch over has been relatively smooth.

With Outlook I plan to use a great many more features than I was able to get with Eudora. A while back I already started to use Outlook for RSS feeds for blog-reading. There too the tool I had been using, the web-based Newsgator site, served me well for a couple of years, but I decided I wanted to read blogs in the same tool that I read email -- so that was going to be Outlook.

I've already switched over all my Contacts data into Outlook too, info which had formerly been stored in a custom Access database I had designed. And I intend to start using Outlook's item categorization features, the Tasks feature, the To-Do Bar, and perhaps Calendaring. I doubt I'll use its Journal or Notes features, as I use Microsoft OneNote for that sort of thing already.

For long-time Outlook users, all of this "ho-hum" no doubt. But for someone who had been using Eudora for 10+ years, it has been a major switch-over! So far, so-good...