Perhaps your like me and your work email goes through Microsoft Exchange which rather forces you into Outlook as the default Windows client unless your IT department has the where-with-all to provide IMAP support. When it comes to Outlook personally, I fit well within the 20% of the 80/20 rule. While it’s far more than I need at the same time it’s lacking things like basic NNTP support. I’m not a manager and I don’t need a “cockpit” view for managing communications, people and resources. What I prefer is the following in one app:

• Email (IMAP and POP)
• NNTP newsgroup access
• RSS access
• Calendaring for the few meetings I have each week and the spurious all hands meetings

The first three come with Mozilla’s Thunderbird 2.0 and the last bullet item you can get with two add-ons, namely Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar. These last two allow me to easily synchronize my work (read Outlook) calendar with Google which means I can access my calendar from any browser as well as receive notifications on my cell phone for meetings, all for free.