I can't use outlook express; I can't afford outlook. What should I use?

[KatyMac]

Basically that's it

I had outlook & now I have outlook express

it's not good enough

[BertieBotts]

There's a free one made by the developers of firefox, I don't know if that's any good?

[MrAnchovy]

gmail?
upgrade to windows 8 with built in mail?
outlook.com?
thunderbird (which is what BertieBotts was referring to)?

[KatyMac]

I can't use strikeout
I can't use my company colours
I haven't even tried a signature
it looks wrong

I'm pathetic

[KatyMac]

What's outlook.com?

[NarcolepsyQueen]

Zimbra desktop?

[MrAnchovy]

It's Microsoft's answer to gmail.

Outlook Express is crap, really don't use it. It regularly corrupts its own database. You can repair this by recovering a file from the trash. Sometimes. Or by buying a hacky third party tool.

[MrAnchovy]

Bear in mind that not everyone uses an email client that displays formatted text. Viewing your message in B&W instead of lime green on puce is probably an improvement, but seeing (or hearing, braille reading...) text you intended to strike out as plain text is likely to change the sense of your message.

[KatyMac]

Generally I use strike out to DD

My colour is dark brown on white

& I hate outlook

[KatyMac]

Well I like Firefox so I wonder if I should try Thunderbird

[MrAnchovy]

Whatever you use, set it up to use IMAP to communicate with your email provider (actually I didn't mention your email provider - they will almost certainly have a webmail client you can use) rather than POP. This will make it much easier switching around. If you use an email service that stores copies of sent messages on the server (like gmail or the Google Apps service that uses your own domain rather than @gmail.com and used to be free for personal users but is now £35 a year) you can even use a number of different clients simultaneously and always have both received and sent emails in sync.

[KatyMac]

I won't ever pretend to understand that

[loladol]

Hello, about the outlook topic. I use google mail - gmail - I need help converting files to outlook itself. I don't know much about it, so I'd like to know more. At least some advice would be helpful.