Moving from Outlook to Mail / iCal

Yesterday I decided to move away from Outlook on something of a whim.  It’s been fine, as Mail is really a nice feeling app and after a day+ of usage I’m feeling really good about the decision.  Search, sorting and conversation threads are much better in Mail vs Outlook.  Search is quite poor actually in Outlook so any change is good there …

There are a few small details I’d love to resolve though in my new system:

  • There’s no way in iCal to NOT send a response when replying to a request.  Outlook gives you the option for staying semi-stealth if you like.
  • Mail seems to add colored backgrounds to text pasted in from certain sites … something I do rather frequently and there’s no obvious way to remove this formatting.  In Outlook, I could just change the background color to white and it would go away.
  • Some structured formats are a bit strange … Today I pasted in a bullet list from Word and it wrapped way left which made it a bit of a challenge to read.  I chose to compose this particular note back in Outlook so it would send properly as it was a client email.

Aside from these somewhat minor issues, I’m likely to stay with the new combo vs Outlook.    I’d still welcome solutions if anyone has thoughts …

 

Outlook stuck offline?

I’ve had this problem intermittently for a while now and it’s driving me crazy.  Of course it only happens when I’m out of the office on VPN.  Here are the steps to reproduce it:

  1. Initiate VPN
  2. Launch Outlook

Standard procedure right?  Sure except my Outlook seems to enjoy getting stuck in Offline mode with absolutely no way to get it back.  Before you suggest selecting Go Online from the file menu, have a looksee …

outlook offline no workie

Notice anything missing?  Exactly.