Review by S. Jentsch

I have been using this program on a PC with Office 2007 installed, and upgraded from Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager (BCM). Two POP3 accounts were managed, and about 100-125 business contacts were tracked. I have four years’ worth of E-Mail stored, amounting to thousands of E-Mail messages.

For those contemplating an upgrade from Outlook 2003 with BCM, you should do so. BCM is a good idea, but the 2003 version (even after the service packs) were not as good as they could have been. The 2007 version is definitely an improvement in every way except speed, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The E-Mail features of Outlook 2007 are pretty good. The ability to set up rules to auto-process incoming messages is very good, much like the 2003 version. The search folders and new flagging options are very handy to make it easier to find messages according to a variety of filters/searches. The fact that you can flag a message for follow-up at a later time, and have that appear as a notification and on your to-do list is very handy. I have yet to make full use of all of those related features to the best of their potential.

Spam filtering is a weak point, but no worse than in the 2003 version. The simplified profile-based filtering with the ability to set up white lists and black lists is very basic compared to more sophisticated bayesian filtering available in other packages. I installed the SpamBayes add-on filter (freeware) which uses Bayesian filtering, and it’s much more flexible in classifying spam messages. Spam filtering is so important these days, and when freeware packages do it better than a $100+ product from the likes of Microsoft, the people at Redmond should be embarrassed.

The BCM works very well. Being able to track E-Mail messages, calendar events, to-do items, and other items to customers is very cool. I’ve not used other contact managers, so I don’t know how it compares, but it serves my needs, so I haven’t looked elsewhere.

Its limited spam filtering ability is nothing compared to the speed issues encountered when incoming messages are retrieved from my two POP3 accounts. When the messages are being retrieved, Outlook stops cold. If you are typing a message, you can forget about continuing until the incoming messages are processed. It’s incredibly frustrating to see a well-equipped machine brought to a halt, but that’s exactly what happens. It’s not a result of high CPU usage; a look at the CPU meter shows that neither processor meters is pegged when it happens.

It was really bad in 2003, and just a little better in 2007, but still not acceptable. I have tried many different things, including archiving more messages into the archive.pst file instead of the outlook.pst file, but the improvements were only minor.

Some would consider Outlook to be the embodiment of evil. As a person who came from using unix-based E-Mail (pine and elm anyone?), to PMMail for both OS/2 and Windows, I didn’t have any problem getting used to Outlook and appreciating the extra features it brought to the table. Like anything, it’s more often the operator behind the keyboard than the software on the computer.

Outlook 2007 with BCM is a good product, but it could, and should, be better.