It was hard, tedious work, but, today, I finally dumped Outlook. Nearly six months of using it and it was driving me mad. No decent threading, slow interface, battery sapping processor requirement and a wrist-aching dependency on the mouse. Awful, truely awful.

So, it’s back to Gnus.

The irony is, this is all unnecessary. Our local systems people, ISS, have a daft policy of actively trying to stop people using other clients. This is to reduce the amount of work they have to do, and to encourage the use of Outlooks shared calendars. So, they’ve switched the IMAP interface to Exchange off. Result, if you want the calenar, you have to use the Exchange email, and therefore, outlook; in my case, the cost of UI is such that it’s not worth advantage of the shared calendar.

It’s good to be back in the rapid environment of Gnus, though; I can move around quickly, I don’t need the mouse and I can control what the email looks like. As a side effect, I’ll be back in a programmable environment which will be great for returning coursework and the like.

Originally published on my old blog site.