Mention email and most Windows users immediately think of Outlook. The Outlook email client from Microsoft has become so entrenched in the Windows desktop that most users don't even know there are alternatives. We look at five alternative email clients that run on Windows, and in most cases, other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux.

When you are using Squirrelmail for IMAP and using a client like Outlook Express, you will find that the folders do not play well together. You can modify both the client and the Squirrelmail settings to get them to work together.

Linux comes with various GUI based email client to stay in touch with your friends and family, and share information in newsgroups with other users. The following software is similar to Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail and is used by both home and office user.

One obstacle some organizations face when trying to migrate from Microsoft Exchange to a free groupware server has been Outlook users who, for whatever reason, are not yet willing to switch to another client. Bynari, Inc. in collaboration with a number of server developers, including the Citadel project [http://www.citadel.org] has developed a new Outlook connector that uses open standard data formats and protocols to store groupware data. Users of legacy environments (i.e. Windows + Outlook) will now be fully interoperable on the same server with users of free software. This could potentially spell the permanent end of Exchange lock-in.

Microsoft appears to be serious about making Outlook more accessible to open source developers. On May 24, the Redmond, Wash software giant announced two new open source projects designed to complement its recently released technical documentation for Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (.pst).

Microsoft has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the newsfeeds of millions of Facebook users into inboxes across the world.

Issue 8 of o3 magazine is now available. This issue provides an end to end guide for building enterprise grade email systems using FOSS. o3 magazine is a FREE digital magazine, published twice a month in PDF format.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book titled Zimbra which is a compact, friendly Administrators Guide containing plenty of step-by-step instructions as well as useful references and checklists. It shows readers how to install and configure Zimbra for use with the web client, Outlook, and mobile devices.

I’m the increasingly discontent owner of an Hotmail account (don’t laugh, I subscribed back when Hotmail wasn’t owned by Microsoft). Recently, in order to compete with Google on the Web, Hotmail’s interface was overhauled: it now has a “classic” interface, which works reasonably well but is still rather limited, and a supposedly “Full” interface that should make it the equal of sites like Google Apps and Yahoo Mail/Calendar/etc.