Microsoft Outlook

For the e-mail and news client bundled with certain versions of Microsoft Windows, see Outlook Express.

Microsoft Office Outlook

File:Outlook 2007.png
Screenshot of Outlook 2007.
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Stable release	12.0.6014.5000 / April 2007
Operating system	Microsoft Windows
Type	Personal information manager
License	Proprietary EULA
Website	The Official Microsoft Outlook site

Microsoft Outlook or Outlook (full name Microsoft Office Outlook since Outlook 2003) is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite.

Although often used mainly as an e-mail application, it also provides a calendar, task and contact management, note taking, a journal and web browsing.

It can be used as a stand-alone application, but can also operate in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server to provide enhanced functions for multiple users in an organization, such as shared mailboxes and calendars, public folders and meeting time allocation.

Different versions

Outlook replaced Microsoft's previous scheduling and mail program, Schedule+ and Exchange Client.

Versions of Microsoft Outlook include:

Outlook for MS-DOS	bundled with Exchange Server 5.5
Outlook for Windows 3.x	bundled with Exchange Server 5.5
Outlook for Macintosh	bundled with Exchange Server 5.5
Outlook 97 (version 8)	released January 16 1997, also bundled with Exchange Server 5.5
Outlook 98 (version 8.10?) uncertain	released June 21 1998
Outlook 2000 (version 9)	released June 7 1999, also bundled with Exchange 2000 Server
Outlook 2002 (version 10) included in Office XP	released May 31 2001
Office Outlook 2003 (version 11)	released October 21 2003, also bundled with Exchange Server 2003
Office Outlook 2007 (version 12)	released November 30 2006

(release dates are for U.S. product launches)
The version numbers follows the Office numbers.

File:Microsoft Outlook 2000 - Outlook Today.png

The "Outlook Today" screen in Microsoft Outlook 2000.

Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000 could be installed in one of two configurations:

• Internet Mail Only or IMO mode: A lighter application mode with specific emphasis on POP3 accounts and IMAP accounts and including a lightweight Fax application.

• Corporate Workgroup or CW mode: A full MAPI client with specific emphasis on Microsoft Exchange accounts.

Microsoft also released several versions of Outlook for the Apple Macintosh; however, most mail features were disabled after Office 98. After Office 98, Entourage replaced Outlook on Macintosh systems, although in 2001 Microsoft released Outlook 2001 for Mac to allow Classic users to access Exchange servers. Over the past few years, Microsoft has improved Entourage to provide Mac users with a Mac OS X-compatible Exchange client, though it does not have the entire functionality provided by Outlook.

Outlook Express is a slimmed-down e-mail, newsgroup, and contact management application that Microsoft makes available at no charge, in conjunction with the Internet Explorer web browser. Other than the similar name there is no connection between the two products and they originate from different divisions of Microsoft. While both offer access to POP3 and IMAP4 e-mail accounts, only Outlook offers client access (MAPI) to Microsoft Exchange. Outlook Express is replaced with Windows Mail in Windows Vista.

Internet standards and Microsoft Outlook

Outlook is an integrated application for email, calendaring, tasks, contacts and much more. However, it does not fully support Internet standards for calendaring or contacts such as iCalendar, CalDAV, SyncML and vCard 3.0. Outlook 2007 claims to be fully iCalendar compliant, however it does not support all core objects, such as VTODO, VJOURNAL. Also, Outlook supports vCard 2.1 and does not support multiple contacts in the vCard format as a single file. Outlook has also been criticized for having proprietary "Outlook extensions" to these Internet standards. Also, for Outlook 2007, Microsoft has replaced the more standards-compliant Internet Explorer-based HTML editing/viewing engine with the one from Microsoft Office Word 2007.

Outlook encourages top-posting by placing the cursor above the quoted text. A proponent of bottom-posting has created an application known as Outlook-QuoteFix to change this default to bottom-posting.

Security concerns

One of Microsoft's goals is for the e-mail client to be easy to use. However, the embedded automation and lack of security features compared to competitors have been repeatedly exploited by malicious hackers using e-mail viruses. These typically take the form of an e-mail attachment which executes on the user's machine and replicates itself by mass-mailing the user's or Exchange server's address list. Examples of such viruses are the Melissa and Sobig worms. Other programs have exploited Outlook's HTML e-mail capabilities to execute malicious code or confirm that e-mail addresses are valid targets for spam. The notoriety of the worms and other viruses has gained Outlook a reputation as a highly insecure e-mail platform.

Unix programmer Bill Joy has suggested that Outlook is insecure largely because it was written in C, making it easy to write programs to exploit it. He also believes the widespread use of Outlook is a major contributing factor in the proliferation of spam .

As part of its Trustworthy Computing initiative, Microsoft took corrective steps to fix Outlook's reputation in Office Outlook 2003. Among the most publicized security features are that Office Outlook 2003 does not automatically load images in HTML e-mails, and includes a built-in Junk Mail filter. Service Pack 2 has augmented these features and adds an anti-Phishing filter .

This release was well received, and regarded as the primary driver of Office upgrades among business users.

Newest release

Outlook 2007 was available in retail stores at the end of Jan 2007. A trial is available for download on Office Online. Features include:

• A to-do bar added to the shell UI that shows a snapshot of the user's upcoming appointments and active tasks for better time and project management.
• Improved calendar views that display the tasks due below each day on the week view and supports overlaying multiple calendars.
• Integrated RSS aggregator
• 'Instant Search' through a context indexer based search engine with Windows Desktop Search
• Enhanced integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server
• New programmability features [1]
• Ability to publish calendars in Internet Calendar format to Microsoft Office Online or to a WebDAV server

HTML Rendering

Outlook 2007 was the first Outlook to switch from IE HTML rendering to Microsoft Word HTML rendering (Word 2007 in Outlook 2007's case). This means HTML and CSS items such as the following (many of which are insecure, as implemented by Internet Explorer) would no longer be supported:

applet

form

iframe

object

script

background-image

Animated GIF images

Flash

Replacing bullets with images in unordered lists

The net impact for anyone publishing a newsletter that uses HTML form elements within emails, is that the forms will no longer display: all form elements will be replaced with square brackets. This is a major issue for publishers and small businesses, many of whom have used this technique extensively.

With this switch, Outlook 2007 became even less html standards compliant than Outlook 2003. Simple static html like the following simply stopped working (just the text is displayed; the bars are not rendered):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
  <head>
	 <title>Project Progress</title>
  <head/>
  <body>
  Green and red bars:
  <span style='float:left; background-color:green; position:relative; width:100; top:1; height:11; z-index=1' >
  </span>
  <span style='float:left; background-color:red; position:relative; width:50; top:6; height:11; z-index=1' >		
  </span>
  </body>
</html>

Many more HTML and CSS items [2]

See also

• Comparison of e-mail clients
• List of personal information managers
• Outlook Express
• Outlook Web Access
• Posting styles
• Windows Calendar
• Calgoo

External links

• Official Microsoft Outlook site
• Outlook Developer Portal
• Outlook Attachment Remover - Free add-in for improving Outlook's performance
• Dan's Mail Format Site Help with Outlook settings
• Slipstick Outlook & Exchange Solutions Center
• Prophet - CRM Software for Outlook Outlook Add-on for Sales Teams
• Spam Filter for Outlook - anti-spam add-on for Outlook 2000-2007.
• Time tracking addin for Microsoft Outlook
• ContactGrabber, Addon for saving addresses into Outlook without typing
• 30+ addins for Microsoft Outlook
• Add-in for Microsoft Outlook Outlook networks.
• Chilibase for Outlook Add-On for Advanced Searching
• Archiving, attachment management products for Microsoft Outlook
• Outlook synchronization add-in