Outlook is a program that integrates the Microsoft Office office suite.
Outlook is a word that belongs to the English language and can be translated as “forecast” or “outlook.” Its use in the Spanish language, however, is associated with two computer programs developed by Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft Outlook is an office software and email client that is part of the Microsoft Office suite. It can be used as a stand-alone application or, in the case of a company that wants its employees to share the calendar and messages, with the Microsoft Exchange Server program.
The origins of Outlook date back to 1989 , when the first version of Microsoft Office was released. Over time, various improvements were included regarding the calendar, contact management, writing notes and searches. The possibility of importing messages and contacts from other email clients was also developed.
Outlook Express , sometimes referred to simply as Outlook , is another email client produced by Microsoft . This software is distributed together with Internet Explorer and is a simpler version of Microsoft Outlook and specialized in managing email and reading news on the Internet.
Outlook weaknesses
One of Outlook's weak points compared to its online competition has always been its limited support for CSS properties and HTML attributes . For example, not even the old CSS1 nor its successor, version 2, are fully interpreted by the program and many of its properties can only be used with certain HTML type elements. In an era in which formatted messages, with images, backgrounds and tables have become the option of all electronic businesses, this delay at a technological level represents a serious disadvantage for the end user, as well as for the companies that send these emails. .
Although there are some HTML attributes that improve the display of emails with CSS in Outlook, many of these have been deprecated in HTML version 4.0, and are considered obsolete in the language's own documentation. To achieve the best results with the Microsoft program, it is necessary to use multiple tables, since this element, along with rows and cells, supports Outlook's width and height properties.
When Outlook detects portions of a message code that it cannot interpret correctly, it displays a warning to the user, offering the user the ability to view the email in a browser. Behind this measure, which may seem reasonable and innocent, Microsoft took the opportunity, as on so many other occasions, to try to monopolize the computer market without any respect for its consumers, since it ignored their preferences and ran Internet Explorer .
Today Outlook is the name of Microsoft's webmail service.
Webmail growth
The option to preview emails and the ability to receive multimedia messages (with sounds, images or video clips) always caused security problems for Outlook Express . Given the spread of broadband, on the other hand, this program began to lose ground compared to webmail services, which allow access to the email account from any computer and without the need to configure any client.
This growth in webmail services not only impacted the success of Microsoft Outlook , but the popularity of Hotmail was also overshadowed by Gmail , the undisputed leader of email box providers.
From Hotmail to Outlook
In recent times, Microsoft decided to rename Hotmail under the name Outlook, a measure that was accompanied by a complete change of appearance and an aggressive advertising campaign that aims to highlight the invasion of privacy suffered by Gmail users.
Ironically, the numerous (and very creative) videos of this strategy were spread through YouTube , owned by Google , which in turn owns Gmail .