I don't use Outlook to access other mail accounts, but I do use Gmail to access Outlook, precisely because it offers a stripped down way to access work emails. Outlook is a slow, kludgy resource hog (like most of Office) with a ton of bells and whistles that I don't use, cluttering up the interface and bloating the code. I think it's really oriented to the corporate cloud user. Which I suppose I am. Ho hum.

You're quite right, of course. Worse still, functions and features that would be useful are often squirrelled away in ridiculously obscure and unlikely places. For example, I do some admin for a writers' group and regularly need to resend emails i.e. exact same email to the same or a similar list of people. So where is this obvious feature? Naturally it's on the taskbar when you open a previously sent email. But it isn't in with all the "sendy" options such as reply, reply all, forward etc. It's under "actions" in the "Move" group of commands. And that was one of the easier ones to find.

I quite like gmail, but I suppose I'm lazy and have grown used to Outlook. I also find that gmail's way of ordering conversations can get in the way a bit, although I confess I haven't checked on whether it can be changed.

> but I do use Gmail to access Outlook, precisely because it offers a stripped down way to access work emails.

O_o Has Outlook become so bad that Gmail is considered stripped down?

Actually, considering what Windows 8/10 are like, that shouldn't really be a surprise.

But what about Outlook Web Access? Last time I used that, I think it was more lightweight than even Gmail's "Basic HTML" interface (the one which is apparently going away in a few months).

OWA is pretty much the full Outlook these days, it's sort of impressive sort of stupid.

Thinking specifically of the android Gmail app. I avoid using the browser version.