5 Reasons Why You Should Stop Using Outlook Express Now

Most of who read this are probably using a webmail service like Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail or Gmail. But there more than a few of you – and you know who you are – that are still using Microsoft Outlook Express 6 in Windows XP or Windows 2000.

I’m telling you right now – stop using that client. First I’m going to tell you why to stop using it, then tell you how to migrate to something better.

1. No native spam protection.

Outlook Express on its own has no spam-specific filters to speak of. The difference between a regular filter (which OE6 does have) and a spam filter is that the spam filter is adaptive, i.e. it "learns" as you "train" it.

You probably use some type of third-party spam protection program in your OE6, such as SpamBayes. That’s good, but the problem is that you’re relaying on a third-party program to do something all other mail clients have built-in on a native level. If the third-party program breaks, your mail breaks, and that’s not good. In other words, that third-party program is a liability.

2. No native phishing protection.

The only way to get phishing protection into OE6 is to use an anti-virus suite like McAfee. This is more bad than good. It’s good you have the protection against rogue links, but it’s bad because it can slow your mail down to a crawl.

Again, this is something other mail client have built-in on a native level while OE6 does not.

3. No support for webmail accounts.

OE6 supports POP and IMAP mail accounts. That’s it. The HTTP option for a mail account at one point could be used for Hotmail accounts, but that is no longer supported (the protocol changed), so POP and IMAP is all you have.

Modern email clients support webmail accounts in addition to POP and IMAP. I’ll cover this in a moment.

4. Higher risk of being flagged as spam by other mail providers.

Given the fact that spammers spoof the OE6 client so much when sending out their spam, when you send out legitimate email it may be mistakenly flagged as spam.

The frequency of this occurring has increased over the last few years. And no, it is nothing you are doing wrong. You can squarely point the blame at spammers for that one.

5. DBX files can easily get corrupted.

This is the reason above all others why you should stop using OE6.

All email in Outlook Express 6 is stored in what are called DBX files. This is a proprietary mail database format that OE6 uses, and to the best of my knowledge only used in OE6.

What is not known about DBX files is that they have a 2GB limit. When you reach that limit, the database will go corrupt and you will lose your mail.

Yes, there are utilities out there to fix a corrupted DBX file, but the chances of them actually working are slim.

Each folder in your OE6 is an individual DBX file. The one with the most data in it is probably the Sent Items folder.

How to migrate to another email client

The easiest thing for you to do is migrate to Windows Live Mail. This is the next generation of Outlook Express. When you examine the options of the software, you will see it very closely resembles how OE6 works.

Windows Live Mail will import all your mail, account settings and contacts. It will also support Hotmail accounts directly.

WLmail thankfully does not use DBX mail databases. Instead, every single email is literally saved as an individual file, so the absolute worst that could happen is that one mail would go corrupt instead of an entire folder.

WLmail also has built-in spam and phishing protection.

What happens when you import mail from OE6 to WLmail?

It’s actually better to explain what it doesn’t do.

WLmail will not delete any mail or contacts out of Outlook Express 6 when you perform your importing process. Instead it will just make a copy of everything.

In addition, WLmail does not replace OE6 either. You can run them side by side at the same time if you like. Why you would do that I have no idea, but you can if you wish.

Does WLmail require a huge learning curve?

Not at all. It’s like I said – you’ll notice many similarities in the way WLmail works compared to OE6. The only real differences is when you start to configure things OE6 doesn’t have, such as the spam/phishing options.

My suggestion to you is this: If you’re using OE6, download Windows Live Mail, perform an import and try it out. If you feel it’s something you can switch to, I strongly recommend that you do so you don’t lose your mail due to OE6 limitations.