# Microsoft Outlook 117 Hacker News commenters recommended Microsoft Outlook and 403 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 20 years (8 owners). **Verdict:** Valued for its calendar, group scheduling and enterprise features, especially in the classic desktop client, though critics call the new Outlook slow, memory-hungry and buggy. ## Why people recommend it - Strong calendar and enterprise features (5 comments): "heavily vested in SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, etc. specifically for their enterprise controls" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49899232)) "Outlook Classic could hardly have ever been considered fast." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590627)) "the group scheduling and calendar experience is pretty much the best you're going to find" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592064)) - Classic desktop client is faster (4 comments): "The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46429712)) "the ability to have mail in it's own window that I can easily open messages in, is miles better." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49077840)) "Old Outlook still works and is supported until ~2029. We still use it here." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47624159)) - Handy reactions and pinned messages (4 comments): "A nice thing is that outlook can simply sum up the reactions and show them along the message in a non-intrusive way." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790251)) "I came to like the feature. It's even visible at two places: in the thread list and on an individual email." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790414)) "those reactions are a lot less annoying than short mails expressing the same thing on mailing lists" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790201)) - Scriptable through OLE automation (2 comments): "Since Classic Outlook was developed in the glory days of OLE2.0, it's got OLE Automation baked in." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592631)) "My Outlook mass email sysadmin scripts will have to be pried from my cold dead hands" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46179738)) ## What people warn about - New Outlook slow and memory-heavy (6 comments): "Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250763)) "I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248131)) "Outlook, Teams, and other all show up as msedgewebview2.exe, so you also don't know which app is consuming gigs of memory doing nothing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648370)) - Quality declining, long-standing bugs (6 comments): "Can actually work pretty well but the implementation had been successfully eroded over last decade or more." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47624011)) "I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47442895)) "From my experience using Outlook, they could keep the Outlook team for bugfixes only and still have enough work for the next 5 years just improving/fixing the classic version." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585911)) - Laggy, unresponsive while syncing (2 comments): "Almost every time I use Outlook, I have to rewrite my first sentence because half of it was typed before Outlook was finished doing whatever it does in the background." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585580)) "The stupid thing refuses to respond after switching to a diff network or SSID till it's completed some synchronization of some kind." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584833)) - Pushes ads and Copilot (2 comments): "moved the "Create Email/meeting" buttons in Outlook mobile and stuck the Copilot button there so that you will hit it accidentally" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47589081)) "New outlook also pre loads ads and it takes a few seconds for the paid verification to go through before the ads go away" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587761)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Mozilla Thunderbird](https://hackerapproved.com/p/thunderbird.md): 210 recommend - [Apple Mail](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-mail.md): 57 recommend - [Penguin Mail](https://hackerapproved.com/p/penguin-mail.md): 14 recommend - [GNOME Evolution](https://hackerapproved.com/p/evolution.md): 13 recommend - [K-9 Mail](https://hackerapproved.com/p/k-9-mail.md): 13 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/outlook/email-and-calendar-software-microsoft-outlook) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Microsoft Outlook", https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-outlook/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).