What Gmail Can Learn from Outlook

Most people have to drop Thunderbird or webmail services at work, even they have better choices like Gmail. At GE, the strong firewall blocked all the popular mail services on the web, including Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Fortunately, Gmail has its powerful auto-forwarding function. I could leverage it to read my personal mails at work. People pay a lot of money for Outlook and Exchange. And I do think it's worthy. Outlook has many good features, like flags and calendaring. I have used Thunderbird a bit. The most handy feature of it, in my eyes, is its search power. (And I am looking forward to its new version, providing tagging and better UI.) For Outlook, the Follow-up folder and the flags with different colors help a lot for multi-task handling. You can think in a non-linear way using this feature. But in Gmail, though we have labels and conversations, it's still hard to overview what's going on right now and to prioritize. Outlook stays quietly in the system tray when minimized. Its notification is based on periodical POP3 log-on. The balloons pop-up with the basic buttons: flag and delete. But Gmail doesn't have these in Google Talk, its notification client. Outlook provides more rich text editing features. You can make better signature in it. But in Gmail, only plaintext is accepted.