Is email - and Microsoft Outlook in particular - broken beyond repair?

The tools for handling the mountain of email we receive every day simply aren't good enough

Earlier this week, my email in-box passed the 55,000 unread emails mark.

So, if you've been trying to get hold of me via email, this will be one of the reasons why I haven't responded: I get so many emails - hundreds every day - that I'm lucky if I get to see the ones I need to see, let alone having the time and energy to respond to Jemima at WeGetResults PR enquiring whether I've seen her press release from last month regarding Rinky Dink Software's new Northern Area Sales Manager.

But when I ask the question of whether email is broken beyond repair, I really mean Microsoft Outlook, and by "broken beyond repair", I'm really asking the question of whether the usability of email has kept pace with the growth in email as a communications medium.

To all intents and purposes today, Microsoft Outlook is email, at least for businesses and other organisations. As far as I'm concerned, it's an exceptionally poor tool for the ordinary end user. It's poor in terms of both organising and finding email quickly, and its integration with Outlook's own Calendar is clunky, to say the least.

Inconsistent interface

For a start, Microsoft doesn't even offer a consistent interface between Outlook 2016 and its web client. All those emails you've ‘pinned' to the top of the web version of Outlook don't even appear in Outlook 2016.

While Office 365 has saved organisations from the hassle of running their own email servers, Microsoft hasn't offered any notable innovations with Outlook since, well, Office 365 was introduced.

Well, it did invent the entirely useless "Clutter" folder, which had a habit of filing away genuinely useful emails, and the email-thread view that compacted together emails into one hard to find and navigate clump.

The settings menu is a nightmare to navigate, too, and always has been in Outlook.

Just doing something as simple as finding and editing a signature file, for example, has always been a challenge in Outlook. Indeed, the settings menu in Outlook - like Microsoft's dysfunctional ribbon interface - has always failed to guide users to the simple, everyday tasks while abstracting the barely relevant functions and utilities that are rarely used.

Menu mess

And then there's the almost entirely useless menus Outlook presents when you right-click on an email: in the web version (that I'm using now) the first five are repeats of buttons at the top of the page. ‘Mark as read' is irrelevant to an email you've just clicked on and which will therefore automatically be marked as read anyway. "Junk" and "Move" also duplicate buttons at the top of the page, as does "Categorise".

"Pin" and "Flag", like "Mark as read", are even now-you-see-them-now-you-don't options next to the email author - they literally don't need to be in the pull-down menu.

Off the top of my head, what I could do with is the choice to bring up the other emails in the thread, a "More from this sender" option, "More from sender's organisation", "See replies", and an "Attach to Calendar appointment" option, among others.

Maybe Microsoft could throw-in some of the artificial intelligence know-how it claims to have with a "Find similar emails" option, but that would probably consume far too much Azure compute power to implement.

As an aside, a reflection of how lackadaisical Microsoft is when it comes to user interfaces is the fact that on the button bar and the pull-down menu, some of the same items are given slightly different monikers.

The relative positions of "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons would appear to have been reversed from the Windows norm, while the buttons when you hit "Preview" to see an attachment are literally all over the place for no logical reason.

Who's in charge of the in-house style guide?

One of the benefits of providing email in the cloud, surely, is all the compute task that could be done in the background on the server to make them instantly available to you when you click a button.

For example, Outlook purports to be able to find and present "Flagged items and tasks" (that tick-in-a-box button at the bottom of the left-hand-side window containing your folders). But you may have to wait a while for them to appear and, when they do, expect to see them presented completely differently from the way in which your email in-box is organised.

Searching for answers emails

Then there's Microsoft's baffling implementation of "Search Email and People".

When I look for a long lost email, it's normally because it's important and I want to put it somewhere safe (ie: in a folder) where I can access it quickly and easily again.

But the search function literally takes away the folders, so you can't drag and drop the emails you've just found, buried beneath a mound of 55,000 other emails in your in-box, into another folder. And if you want to search a specific folder, you need to navigate there first because otherwise your choices will be sorely limited.

I'd also like to see particular "views" of my in-box, delivered quickly: all internal emails, for example, or all emails from particular groups or teams within my organisation, such as editorial, events and so on.

Oh, and another thing Microsoft, why have you removed the ability to insert a signature in an email you're replying to that's been opened in a separate window?

Edited in the same window, Outlook gives you the choices of "Send" (in two places, top and bottom); "Attach"; "Discard", and "...", which offers a couple of useful options, such as "Save draft" and "Insert signature", along with some that aren't.

But when you hit that "Edit in a separate window icon" on the top-right, everything in the "..." menu disappears. Why?

I could go on. This is intended as an opinion, not a forensic dissection of the many shortcomings of Microsoft Outlook.

But what incentive does Microsoft have to listen, let alone tidy it up? Outlook is a de facto monopoly and bundled with Office 365, and the moderately raised blood pressure caused to users (ie: me) isn't really a sound basis for starting up a slightly better alternative.

^{What's your opinion on Microsoft Outlook - and what would you change if you could. Tell us below!}

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