Comparison Outlook & Gmail

We all use email. You can hardly get through the day without writing your share of emails and replying to people. Who do you use? As many people will say, it all depends on whether you are using either Outlook & Gmail already. Let’s do a comparison between the two.

Difference Between Outlook and Gmail

The first difference is Gmail is a web-based email service provider, it provides the service of sending and receiving emails. On the other hand, MS Outlook is a desktop-based email application that you can use to configure any email account.

What is Gmail

Gmail is a free email service provider of Google. It is a web-based email service. You can send and receive emails, make contacts, calendar, and make notes, or add tasks. In addition, you can assess the Gmail account from the Web or by a third-party app that configures emails through POP and IMAP servers.

Each account added to Gmail has an extension of @gmail.com. You can also schedule a mail-in Gmail. Since it is a free email service, you are only provided with a space of 15GB.

All mails receive and send through Gmail are stored in Google servers. A prevalent drawback is that Google can access your private mails. However, on the plus side, you can get the backup of all your emails from Google. But do not think you can blame Google if your mail data is deleted from the server. After all, it is a free service.

On the contrary, this is a big reason that all big enterprises use their custom mail account and server for communication with their clients and customers.

What Is Outlook

Outlook is a personal information manager by Microsoft 365®. It is a desktop-based email application in which you can configure any email account. Apart from sending and receiving emails, you can also save contacts, make tasks, plan to-do lists and see the calendar.

It must be noted that Outlook is a desktop-based email client. Overall, it provides the service of configuring any email account in it. You can also use your Gmail account in Outlook. What? Why would you want to do that? Here are a few benefits.

1 – A copy of all your mail data will save in your system in the form of OST and PST files. This gives you the freedom to easily make backups.

2 – You are able to access your email account offline, which means you can see previously downloaded mails.

3 – Moreover, you can write a new mail and save it to default without Outlook.

By the way, as it happens, Microsoft also provides a free email address which is called @Outlook.com and @Hotmail.com)

Differences between Email Client and Email Service Provider

To be sure, Outlook and Gmail have a lot of similarities. However, the main differences between the two are listed below.

To begin with, the first difference as we mentioned before is that Gmail is an email service provider. On the other hand, Outlook is an email client. In simple words, in Gmail, only accounts that have @gmail.com extension at the end of their address can be configured. But in Outlook, you can configure your email account of any email service provider like Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Zoho Mail, Hot Mail, etc.

Outlook Folder Vs Gmail Labels

In Outlook you can add multiple folders in an email account. Also, you can collectively group similar emails in this folder. As an example, you can add a new folder named “important file” and then transfer all your important emails to this folder.

In contrast, Google is different. Instead of grouping similar mails into a new folder, Gmail stores them as labels. You can also apply a label filter to a particular email address, and then every mail received from that email address will go to the applied label.

Outlook Flag Vs Gmail Star

In Gmail, you can identify a message that is important by starring it.

In Outlook, what you do instead is assign a flag to it. You can also use different colors to flag a message, besides which you can designate how important the message is.

Moving Spam Emails

In the case of Google, they have a little bit of an advantage over Outlook in the area of moving spam. In Outlook, you have to do the transfer manually over to the junk email folder. But in Gmail, you can apply the label filter to the email account that sends spam emails. That way, all emails from that particular account will automatically move to the trash label.

Composing New Emails

In Outlook, a new window will open when you click on a new mail button to compose a new email. In contrast, a pop-up appears on the existing window when you click on the compose button in Gmail.

In my opinion, this makes Gmail the winner in this section because in their case, you have a pop-up that appears on your existing window. You also have the full capability to see your email folders, emails, and other Google-related operations.

But in Outlook, that is not the case because a new window will open if you click on the New Email button to compose a new email message, and it opens full screen. The only way to see your folders and previous emails is if you take down the size of the New Email window.

Concluding Notes

So in conclusion, who is the clear winner of the best comparison between Outlook and Gmail? There is no definitive answer to this question. It all depends on your needs as to which features are best for you.

However, there are a couple of notes I can include here.

According to Lisa Hendrickson, Call That Girl Microsoft Outlook Expert, puts it best this way in an interview she did with Tom Lawrence of Lawrence Technology Services. “Alright, first thing, I’m gonna just tell everybody as before, a lot of technicians prefer G Suite. They prefer Google, they prefer Linux. But you gotta remember that business clients typically love Outlook. Yes, I don’t care about Word and Excel and all that stuff. You can do that through OpenOffice. And all these other programs, Outlook is their bread and butter.”

In particular, there is a benefit of using Outlook. You can get extra security of your data because all your mails data will save in your system. The Microsoft Outlook is a paid utility, so there is no problem with space in Outlook. But you will get a limited space of 15 GB in G-mail.

So, there you have it. This is the end of our comparison of Outlook versus Gmail. If you have questions about the setup or handling of either, please contact us.

#microsoftoutlook #Google #Gmail #emailservice

Categorised in: Email

This post was written by Megabite