Gmail vs. Outlook

What's the best platform for managing your email?

- GUY COCKER

ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, a previous employer of mine decided to move its email provider from Microsoft to Google. I was overjoyed. At the time, Outlook was tired, clunky, and ugly, while Gmail had a beautiful interface, a proper mobile app, and the ability to enable add-ons. This included one that could delay sending your email so you could go back and edit it or, for an ill-advised 11pm rant to the boss, delete it completely in the morning.

While Gmail is still the better-looking of the two, much has changed in the intervening years. Microsoft has improved its mobile apps, Microsoft 365 has become an integral part of the Windows 10 and Windows 11 experience, and new features such as the ability to see all your attachments in one place are genuinely useful. Gmail hasn’t rested on its laurels either, rolling out new features such as the ever-popular Smart Compose predictive text input. It has also reduced users’ storage, which combined with the back-pedaling of unlimited free Google Photos, is clearly an attempt to nudge users towards a paid subscription tier.

Let’s start with Google because it feels like the default email provider for many. Gmail launched in 2004 with the promise of “never delete another email”. It even had a ticker on the home page showing how its storage was gradually rising to cope with the new emails it was receiving.